THE AMERICAN BOOKS 





AMERICAN 
LITERATURE 

















‘a 


ae 


~~ 








— 











































































































THE AMERICAN BOOKS 


A LIBRARY OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP 


“The American Books”’ are designed as a 
series of authoritative manuals, discussing 
problems of interest in America to-day. 


THE AMERICAN BOOKS 


THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 
THE INDIAN TO-DAY 
COST OF LIVING 


THE AMERICAN NAVY 


MUNICIPAL FREEDOM 


AMERICAN LITERATURE 


(TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN 


SOCIALISM IN AMERICA 
AMERICAN IDEALS 

THE UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 
THE AMERICAN SCHOOL 


Poe FEDERAL RESERVE 


BY ISAAC SHARPLESS 
BY CHARLES A. EASTMAN 
BY FABIAN FRANKLIN 


BY REAR-ADMIRAL FRENCH 
E. CHADWICK, U. S. N. 


BY OSWALD RYAN 


BY LEON RELLNER 
BY JULIA FRANKLIN) 


BY JOHN MACY 

BY CLAYTON §S. COOPER 
BY IRA REMSEN 

BY WALTER S. HINCHMAN 


BY HH, PARKER WIP Lio 


(For more extended notice of the series, see the last pages 
of this book.) 








The American Books 


AMERICAN 
LITERATURE 


BY 


LEON KELLNER 


Professor in the Unwersity of Czernowitz 


TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN 
BY 


JULIA FRANKLIN 





WITH A PREFACE 


BY 


GUSTAV POLLAK 


GARDEN Chie NEW YORK 


DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
IIS 








Copyright, 1915, by 
DouBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
All rights reserved, including that of 


translation into foreign languages, 
including the Scandinavian 


PREFACE 


In unis ‘Geschichte der Nordamerikanischen 
Literatur,” published at Leipzig a year ago, 
Professor Leon Kellner undertook to acquaint 
Germans, in brief outline, with the characteristic 
features of the literature of our country. The 
verdict pronounced on the two little volumes by 
the press was so favorable that an English trans- 
lation, for the benefit of American readers, has 
seemed justifiable. The author’s knowledge of 
his subject, his broad outlook, and his incisive 
and independent judgments will, it is hoped, 
commend themselves to audiences able to com- 
pare his methods with literary canons generally 
accepted in this country and in England. 

It had been intended to submit the English 
version to Professor Kellner’s scrutiny, but the 
exigencies of the European war have made this 
impossible. The University of Czernowitz, in 
the Austrian crown land of Bukowina, where 
Doctor Kellner has filled the chair of English 
philology and literature since 1904, is closed, the 


NE 


V1 Preface 


town itself during the last few months having 
been alternately occupied by the Russians and 
Austrians. I have attempted to learn the 
whereabouts of Professor Kellner, but have so 
far been unsuccessful. When I met him last 
summer in Vienna, shortly before the outbreak 
of the war, he spoke, with all the warmth of his 
enthusiastic nature, of his hope of visiting our 
country. Since then the fates have interfered 
with all his plans. 

In accordance with Professor Kellner’s gen- 
eral views on the subject, as gathered in my talks 
with him, I have permitted myself to suggest to 
the publishers of the present work the advis- 
ability of omitting the concluding portion of the 
book, which consisted in the main of a rapid 
survey of writers not elsewhere treated by the 
author, and was supposed to bring out the char- 
acteristics of the various states. In doing so, 
[ have felt that I was but carrying out Doctor 
Kellner’s intentions, since he expressed to me 
his earnest wish to make any changes in proof 
which were in the direction of greater accuracy 
in detail, and also requested me to indicate what, 
in my opinion, had better be omitted. It may 
likewise be proper to mention that Kellner’s 
vivid characterizations of New England life have 


Preface Vil 


been left untouched, even where the reader must 
make allowance for the fact that the conditions 
upon which the author comments are rather those 
of a bygone time than of the present day. 

It will be seen that Professor Kellner’s vol- 
ume is not a history of American literature in 
any exhaustive sense. ‘This he could not have 
written within the limits which he set himself, 
but he has succeeded in doing what no German 
writer before him has ever attempted—that is to 
say, in tracing briefly the main currents of our 
literature, in placing before the reader vivid 
sketches of our great literary figures outlined 
against an ample historical and philosophical 
background, and in introducing a mass of minor 
writers the characterization of whom, if only in 
a few rapid strokes, gives color and animation 
to the whole picture. American letters have 
hitherto received but scant justice at the hands 
of German scholars. Only a very few literary 
historians, such as Brunnemann, Knortz, and 
Engel, have aimed at giving a survey of the 
general aspects of the subject, while scholars 
like Hermann Grimm and Anton Schénbach 
have contented themselves with describing to 
their countrymen some one outstanding literary 
figure, such as Emerson and Hawthorne. 


Vill Preface 


Narrow as is the compass of Professor Kell- 
ner’s work, we find in his pages characteriza- 
tions of our literary celebrities whose substantial 
accuracy will not be questioned. They dis- 
close remarkable familiarity not only with our 
literature but with our historic past. In ac- 
cordance with what seems to be a wise plan, 
Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, above all Holmes, 
among the New England writers; Cooper, Bret 
Harte, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry 
James, among different surroundings, are singled 
out for full, adequate, and picturesque treat- 
ment; the foreign note here and there ob- 
servable but emphasizes the writer’s individual 
point of view. Lesser authors appear in be- 
coming perspective, though by no means in 
shadowy outlines. Even where his judgmentis at 
variance with current criticism there is a refresh- 
ing outspokenness, as in his plea for greater 
justice to the literary ability of Harriet Beecher 
Stowe than is commonly accorded to it. 
Throughout, we have the feeling that the author 
must be ranked with those writers who, as 
Lessing says, “‘write not merely to show their 
wit and scholarship, but who have in mind the 
best and most enlightened of their time and their 
country, and consider only that worthy of being 


Preface 1X 


put down which pleases and appeals to them.” 
The German reader for whom Professor Kellner 
indited his appreciations of our great writers has 
through him learned to know in Holmes and 
Emerson true classics—those who, in Sainte- 
Beuve’s phrase, have enriched the human mind 
and really added to its treasures. 

The attention which Professor Kellner be- 
stowed on these writers is the outgrowth of a 
deeply rooted interest in New England life. He 
understands every intellectual and emotional 
phase of the New England character, widely as 
his temperament differs from that of the Puritan. 
In a letter now before me he says: “‘ The strongest 
impression of my youth was an almost ascetic 
simplicity of life practised by my parents and 
all my relatives. And this way of living was 
not forced upon us by necessity, but was the 
result of conviction. From childhood I had 
acquired, through precept and example, puri- 
tanic habits of thought and puritanic conduct. 
You may perhaps learn, from my little book 
on North American literature, how deeply I 
sympathize with the Scottish and New England 
nature.” 

A few data concerning Professor Kellner’s past 
will not be out of place here. Born of Jewish 


X Preface 


parents at Tarnow, Galicia, in 1859, he was early 
initiated into Hebraic studies, and he has re- 
tained his interest in Jewish history and the 
critical interpretation of the Bible throughout 
life. After attending lectures on the classics 
in the University of Vienna, he devoted himself 
to the comparative study of languages, taking 
courses in Gothic and Old-High German under 
Richard Heinzel, and in Anglo-Saxon under 
Schipper and Brandl. ‘These preparatory steps 
led to a journey, in 1888, to England, where he 
spent a year in arduous and fruitful work. He 
published for the Early English Text Society 
Caxton’s “‘Blanchardyn and Eglantine,” with 
an introduction on the syntactic peculiarities 
of the text which attracted the attention of 
scholars. In 1890 he became Privat-Dozent in 
English philology in the University of Vienna, a 
position which he subsequently exchanged for 
the full professorship at Czernowitz. Asked 
by the firm of Macmillan to furnish a history 
of English syntax, Kellner produced his “ His- 
torical Outlines of English Syntax” (1892), 
which has passed through many editions, and 1s 
still used as a textbook in English and American 
universities. In 1g05 Doctor Kellner edited, 
together with Henry Bradley, the standard 


Preface Xi 


“Historical Outlines of English Accidence”’ of 
the late Richard Morris. While in England 
he came into contact with the members of the 
Fabian Society, more particularly with William 
Archer and Graham Wallas, and his interest in 
English literature assumed a new direction 
through acquaintance with the social currents 
and the tendencies of English life. 

Doctor Kellner revisited England regularly 
during the following years, widening the circle 
of his British friends and laying the foundation 
of his work on English literature, which was pub- 
lished in 1909 at Leipzig, under the title of ‘‘ Die 
Englische Literatur im Zeitalter der Konigin 
Viktoria “It 1s'a study of great value, and 
particularly happy in its descriptions of the 
principal intellectual movements that gave the 
Victorian age its peculiar significance. The 
chapters on John Stuart Mill and the Utilita- 
rians, on John Henry Newman and the Oxford 
Movement, on George Eliot, Ruskin, and Car- 
lyle, written in a style of great animation, as 
well as his account of the hundreds of minor 
writers mentioned, if only by slight touches, 
bear testimony to the writer’s intimate knowl- 
edge of his subject. It was easy to discern in 
the occasional references to Emerson, Holmes, 


Xil Preface 


Poe, etc., that interest 1n American literature of 
which the present volume is the result. 

Within the last few years Professor Kellner 
has returned to a favorite subject of his early 
years—the textual study of Shakespeare in 
both the quartos and folios. By his close scru- 
tiny of Elizabethan manuscripts in the London 
Record office and in the British Museum he 
has acquired a rare paleographic knowledge of 
Shakespeare’s time, and it may be confidently 
expected that his emendations and conjectures 
concerning the poet’s text, to be published under 
the auspices of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, 
will prove an unusually valuable addition to 
Shakespeare literature. 

Gustav Po.Liak. 

New York, April 13, 1915. 


CONTENTS 
PER ACE Ol a i et a 


CHAPTER PAGE 
I. THe CHARACTER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 3 
1 American History and American Liter- 
ature 
2 Relation of American to English Liter- 
ature 
3 The Two Periods of American Literature 
4 The Subject-Matter of American Liter- 
ature 


Hue Mikst Prose Wrirens.)) 00404 ee 
1 Benjamin Franklin 
2 Washington Irving 
3 James Fenimore Cooper 


Me AMERICA Ponty 40 
The Nature of American Puritanism 

Some Characteristicsof Puritan Poetry 
American Poetry Before Bryant 

William Cullen Bryant 

Whittier 


Minor Poets 


7 The Poetry of the South 
IV, THe SUBJECTIVE WRITERS . .  . «| dee 
A The Transcendentalists 


1 Character of Transcendentalism 
2 Emerson 


NW & Wb = 


Xlll 


XIV Contents 


CHAPTER 


B The Primitives 


1 The Starting-Point 
2 Thoreau 

3. Whitman 

4 Melville 


V. Tue HarvarD INTELLECTUALS . 


1 Common Characteristics 
2 Longfellow 

3 Holmes 

4 Lowell 

s Kindred Spirits 


VI. Tue PsycHo.ocicaL TALE . 


t Historical Connections 
2 Poe 

3, Hawthorne 

4 James and Howells 


VII. THe Humorists 
1 General 


2 Refined Humor 
3 The Humor of Exaggeration 


4 The Humor of Pun and Slang 


Vili. TaLés OF THE 501 
1 Origin and Development 


2 North and South 
3 Harriet Beecher Stowe 
4 Joel Chandler Harris 


INDEX OF AUTHORS 


PAGE 


118 


roy 


7 


AMERICAN LITERATURE 





Crates 


THE CHARACTER OF AMERICAN 
LITERATURE 


1. AMERICAN HISTORY AND AMERICAN 
LITERATURE 


THE contrast between word and deed, between 
experience and representation, is borne in 
upon us with striking force in comparing the 
history of the United States with its literature. 
No people on earth cherished higher aspirations 
than the band of seekers for freedom who, in the 
early part of the seventeenth century, embark- 
ing in a tiny vessel, bade a tearful adieu to their 
English home; and what has been accomplished, 
even though it bear no comparison with what 
was hoped for, is that marvelous achievement, 
the American Republic, with its gigantic power 
and an industrial development unexampled in 
history. The Mayflower, which put to sea in the 
fall of 1620, counted a hundred souls; forty-one 
men landed in December on the rocky coast of 
3 


4 -Ainerican Literature 


Plymouth. After the first pitiless winter on the 
inhospitable soil of the New World, the little 
company was almost swept away by disease; of 
the forty-one Argonauts only seven were able 
to continue the struggle against the elements; 
and the descendants of this little band have in 
the space of 250 years exterminated the natives, 
assimilated the French and Dutch, driven back 
the Spaniards, and—most difficult of all their 
Herculean tasks—thrown off the yoke of the 
mother country. 

When has human will accomplished anything 
so great in so brief a space? Do not all 
heroic acts of ancient and medieval history 
shrink into insignificance by the side of this 
miracle‘ 

We seek in vain, however, for an epic that 
elorifies those great deeds; for a historical pro- 
duction that does justice to those conquerors 
and pathfinders of heroic proportions. The 
first settlers, who subjugated the land with 
musket and plow, were fully conscious of the 
greatness of their work, and efforts were not 
lacking to commemorate the extraordinary 
happenings in written recitals. William Brad- 
ford, one of the patriarchs of the Mayflower and 
member of the first Puritan settlement, wrote a 


The Character of American Literature 5 


“History of the Plymouth Plantation”;* the 
enterprising Captain John Smith, to whom 
Virginia and all the other Southern States owe 
their origin, depicted, in a sustained style ap- 
propriate to the circumstances, his own adven- 
tures,{ nor did the astonishment aroused by the 
unprecedented happenings on the soil of the 
new Colchis fail to be voiced in verse. But the 
forefathers did not go beyond dry, faltering re- 
ports, and their descendants have even to this 
day found no literary expression for the heroic. 
Neither the verse of Longfellow nor the prose 
of Hawthorne rises to the height of the subject. 

And the Americans were destined to have yet 
another heroic age: the more peaceful conquest 
of the territory beyond the Ohio, toward the 
middle of the nineteenth century; then the con- 
flict for the emancipation of the blacks, of 
1861-1865. 

All Americans who took part in the great 
migration to the West or participated in the 
Civil War were deeply stirred by their experi- 
ences and feel that they belong to a heroic 


*William Bradford, “Journal, The History of Plymouth Plan- 
tation, 1630-1649,” in facsimile, with introduction by J. A. Doyle, 
London, 1896. 

tJohn Smith, “New England’s Trials,’ London, 1622. 
Rochester, N. Y., and London (American and Colonial Tracts), 
1897. 


6 American Literature 


age. But how tame does their language sound 
when they attempt to give their feelings poetic 
expression! Joaquin Miller, really Cincinnatus 
Hiner Miller (born in 1841), who created a great 
sensation with his “Songs of the Sierras,” de- 
picts in more than one poem, with temperament 
and poetic swing, the progress of the tens of 
thousands to the West; but how petty, how 
inadequate, are these productions, measured by 
the immensity of the phenomenon! And just 
as little have the hundreds of ballads of North- 
ern and Southern poets succeeded in worthily 
perpetuating the Civil War in the memory of 
their countrymen. 

It is evident that American literature lags 
infinitely far behind American history. 

Various causes may be assigned for this dis- 
parity; it has not as yet been quite adequately 
explained. ‘The generations that preceded 
Cooper and Irving, it is often said, had their 
hands too full, were too overburdened with their 
daily tasks, to turn their thoughts to the luxury 
of literary presentation or creation. But that 
is fat from the truth: 2 [in «pemods, ot. the 
greatest stress, under the most adverse cir- 
cumstances, pools of ink were wasted upon 
theological hairsplitting; the poorest farmers 


The Character of American Literature 7 


found leisure enough to read the confused mass 
of sermons and polemical treatises, which would 
not be stomached to-day, that originated in the 
colonies. 

It is said that the youthful settlements were 
dependent in literary matters and drew upon 
the mother country exclusively for their poetic 
needs. ‘This statement is not apposite either. 
When has the craving for artistic expression 
ever been daunted by the fear of recognized 
models? Anna Bradstreet, the wife of a farmer 
and the mother of eight children, found time 
and strength amid the overwhelming daily 
duties of her hard life to fill four hundred octavo 
pages with her verse! All these hewers of wood 
and drawers of water, so grudgingly dealt with 
by Fate, were ready with speech and pen; many 
of them had an ear attuned to harmony and 
loved rhythm and rhyme. 

One explanation alone holds good: absorp- 
tion in God seems incompatible with the pres- 
entation of mankind. The God of the Puritans 
was in this respect, too, a jealous God who 
brooked no sort of creative rivalry. The in- 
spired moments of the loftiest souls were filled 
with the thought of God and his designs; spir- 
itual life was wholly dominated by solicitude re- 


S American Literature 


garding salvation, the hereafter, grace; how could 
such petty concerns as personal experiences of a 
lyric nature, the transports or the pangs of love, 
find utterance? What did a lyric occurrence 
like the first call of the cuckoo, elsewhere so 
welcome, or the first sight of the snowdrop, 
signify compared with the last Sunday’s sermon 
and the new interpretation of the old riddle of 
evilin the world? And apart from the fact that 
everything of a personal nature must have ap- 
peared so trivial, all the sources of secular lyric 
poetry were offensive and impious to Puritan 
theology. For everything that was natural, 
that smacked of the creature, stood in the way 
of sanctification, of elevating one’s self to God. 

Representation of mankind in an epic or, still 
worse, in a dramatic form, totally violated the 
Puritanic spirit, which was saturated with the 
Old Testament abhorrence of the imitation of 
anything in the heavens or on the earth, in the 
air or on the waters. 

This explanation is pertinent as far as the 
North is concerned—from Maine to Delaware. 
But the Southern States—Virginia, Maryland, 
Carolina? We are confronted here by an open 
question. 

But one thing is an established fact: up to the 


The Character of American Literature 9 


close of the eighteenth century America had no 
belletristic literature. 

And what followed is at first a great dis- 
appointment: the first narrators, male and 
female, give imitations of European fashions! 
A few women, like Susanna Haswell Rowson 
and Hannah W. Forster, sing of love, seduction, 
and broken hearts, in the style of Richardson; 
some men, like Royal Tyler and Hugh Henry 
Brackenbridge, follow in the path of Smollett. 
And even a writer so highly gifted as Charles 
Brockden Brown was satisfied with transplant- 
ing to American soil the blood-and-thunder 
style of tale which had been domesticated in 
England by Walpole (“The Castle of Otranto’’), 
Lewis (““The Monk’’), Anne Radcliffe (“The 
Mysteries of Udolpho’’). 

The faculty of poetic portrayal of one’s im- 
mediate surroundings is, as literary history 
teaches us, the last to be acquired by individuals 
and nations; the Americans did not develop it 
until the nineteenth century. 

The American nation did not become conscious 
of the distinctive character of its literature 
until long after it had gained its indepen- 
dence. And the outside world, which, as a rule, 
confirms our own estimate of ourselves, could 


10 American Literature 


not for a long time make up its mind to believe 
in a distinctive American literature. 

It is only the historians of the nineteenth 
century that reflect the greatness of the events 
from which modern America sprang. If glowing 
enthusiasm and unswerving faith alone could 
invest a prose creation with the immortality of 
poesy, George Bancroft’s “ History of the United 
States” would be the epic of the North American 
Republic. And the efforts of the later his- 
torians, such as Francis Parkman’s “The Oregon 
Trail,” his most personal book, and “France 
and England in America,” his life work, or John 
Fiske’s “Beginnings of New England” and 
“The American Revolution,” are imbued with 
the same spirit that animated Bancroft.* 


2. RELATION OF AMERICAN TO ENGLISH 
LITERATURE 


The relation of American to English liter- 
ature was represented on the part of the Eng- 
lish, up to the middle of the nineteenth century, 
in a way to make it appear as if all the poetic 


*When one surveys the imposing series of historians—Bancroft, 
Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Henry Adams, Justin Winsor, 
Edward Channing, John Fiske, McMaster, Woodrow Wilson, 
James Ford Rhodes—one would think that American historical 
writing had absorbed all the epic genius of America. 


The Character of American Literature II 


and prose writings produced in America were 
merely imitations of English models; owing to 
indignation at such depreciation and to a nat- 
ural enough spirit of opposition, the Americans 
were somewhat inclined to deny that their 
literature was in any way dependent upon Eng- 
land. In reality, to an unprejudiced eye the 
matter is perfectly plain. Until the revolt of 
the colonies from the mother country, all Ameri- 
can literary efforts were simply offshoots of the 
English stem, as were the colonies themselves. 
Just as the colonists wear English cloth, eat 
off English plates, build their houses with Eng- 
lish bricks,* so do their theologians, their states- 
men, their publicists, their poets, write in the 
language of the old home, adhere to the forms 
and rhythms, the traditions and tacit under- 
standings, of the old literature. Every author 
is intent upon approaching the English models 
as closely as possible, upon committing no of- 
fence against the purity of the language, above 
all is he careful not to allow any Americanism 
to escape him. Benjamin Franklin wrote to 
Hume: “I hope, with you, that we shall always 
in America make the best English of this Island 
our standard,” and to the lexicographer, Noah 


*G. R. Carpenter, “ Whittier,” p. 7. 


12 American Literature 


Webster: “‘I cannot but applaud your zeal for 
preserving the purity of our language.’’* 

At the close of the eighteenth century, polit- 
ical independence having been achieved, there 
is a natural stirring of pride among writers, 
and a craving for self-reliance makes itself 
distinctly felt. But it does not materialize 
into action. On the contrary, stress is laid 
upon showing the world that now, as ever, the 
new land keeps pace in purity of speech and 
in elegance of style with the mother country. 
Such is—to name only the chief representatives 
—evidently the aim and the trend of thought 
of Washington Irving and Longfellow. Both 
are proud of introducing American matter into 
literature, of applying American local color in 
abundant measure; but as to form, they adhere 
strictly to tradition. 

Many years after the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence it was still the highest praise that 

*C. Alphonso Smith, “Die Amerikanische Literatur,” Berlin, 
1912, p. 4. Charles Whibley lauds the purity of the present 
American literary language also: ‘ American slang knocks in vain 
for admission into American literature. . . . It has no part 
in the fabric of the gravely written language. Men of letters 
have disdained its use with a scrupulousness worthy of our own 
eighteenth century. The best of them have written an English as 
pure as a devout respect for tradition can make it 7 lt 
you contrast the English literature of to-day with the American, 


you will find differences of accent and expression so slight that you 
may neglect them.” Jdid., p. 98. 


The Character of American Literature 13 


could be accorded an American author that he 
emulated his English model so successfully that 
one might exclaim: “It could be taken for the 
work of an Englishman.” 

When Bryant’s ‘“Thanatopsis’ appeared, 
people were carried away by the poem—because 
they were reminded of Wordsworth, Keats, and 
Shelley. In fact, the Greek word itself—an 
arbitrary coinage of Bryant’s, as Epipsychidion 
was a coinage of Shelley’s—indicates an English 
model, and the rhythm of English blank verse 
was ringing in the ears of the American.* 

The fame of Washington Irving was based 
upon his being a reminder of Addison, and it 
was said of Cooper—with great injustice and 
greatly to his annoyance—that he was the 
American Scott. 

Lowell may be regarded as the first American 
literary man of culture, taste, esprit, and creative 
force, who rebelled against this self-imposed 
servitude and asserted the right of Americans 
to their own individuality in language and style. 
“A Fable for Critics,” which appeared in the 


*American histories of literature point to Wordsworth as Bry- 
ant’s teacher. That is not to be disputed; but ‘‘ Thanatopsis ” 
reminds one of Keats, not of Wordsworth. If one compares the 
first verses of the American with the opening lines of “‘ Endymion,” 
he will be surprised at the resemblance of the melody. 


14 American Literature 


revolutionary year 1848, embodies a veritable 
declaration of independence of American litera- 
ture. 

And how did the world outside of America 
and England feel toward American authorship? 
The first American writer to become famous 
throughout Europe was Benjamin Franklin; 
the first to be read by all Europe was James 
Fenimore Cooper; the first that convinced all 
Europe of the existence of an American litera- 
ture was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Franklin owed 
his fame to a successful political mission and to 
the invention of the lightning-rod; otherwise his 
homely, Philistine wisdom would hardly have 
found an audience beyond the narrow limits of 
his native land. In Cooper’s Leatherstocking 
Tales what told was the new subject-matter, 
the strange world of primeval forest and prairie. 
It was in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet 
Letter” that the work of a master of narrative 
on American soil was first recognized; the year 
1850 is the natal year of the American novel, in 
the highest significance of that term, as meas- 
ured by European standards. Hawthorne’s 
work has its place by the side of “‘ Pére Goriot”’ 
and ‘“‘The Newcomes,” by the side of “Adam 
Bede” and “Anna Karenina.” 


The Character of American Literature 15 


Thenceforth the relation to England becomes 
wholly  different—friendlier, more intimate. 
There is no longer any hatred of English litera- 
ture, because there is no longer the fear of the 
schoolmaster’s rod; from the day that England 
renounces her untenable right of guardianship, 
both nations, English and American, become 
aware of the true historic relation between 
American and English literature: it 1s the rela- 
tion between branch and tree. 


3. THE TWO PERIODS OF AMERICAN 
LITERATURE 


The history of American literature in the 
nineteenth century—it is substantially only 
this that we have to take into account as belong- 
ing to the domain of belles-lettres—is divided 
into two unequal parts, of fundamentally dif- 
ferent nature. The first extends to the close 
of the Civil War (1865), and is in the main the 
history of authorship as it was pursued in the 
northeastern section, particularly in the New 
England States; it is only in the second period, 
dating from the middle of the sixties, that we 
are concerned with the literature of the rest of 
the states, with American literature in general. 
During the first period intellectual America 


16 American Literature 


has its centre of gravity in New England, or, 
to be more exact, in Massachusetts; Boston 1s 
the hub of the literary world.* 

For all American idealists Boston was a sort 
of celestial city, somewhat as Jerusalem 1s for 
believers the world over. 

“T want you to remember, my dear child,” 
says an enthusiastic Pennsylvania doctor to 
his niece, “that in Boston you are not only in 
the birthplace of American liberty, but the yet 
holier scene of its resurrection. ‘There every- 
thing that is noble and grand and liberal and 
enlightened in the national life has originated.”’f 

In the forties there was gathered in Massa- 
chusetts that group of high-souled men, who, 
under the name of Transcendentalists, became 
world-renowned—Alcott, Emerson, Channing, 
Thoreau. And when the glory of the saints of 
Concord was eclipsed, there beamed the splendor 
of the poets, scholars, and humorists of Cam- 
bridge—Agassiz, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, 
Motley. That in itself suffices to explain why 
Massachusetts so long retained the leadership 

*“Boston State House is the hub of the solar system,” says 
Oliver Wendell Holmes in jest; this is often incorrectly quoted. 
“The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” p. 125 (O. W. Holmes, 


Writings, 13 vols., Riverside Press). 
tHowells, “A Chance Acquaintance,” p. 21 (Boston, 1874). 


The Character of American Literature 17 


in literary matters. The Civil War of 1861- 
1865 paved the way for the end of this hegem- 
ony. The victory achieved by New England 
over the South and West, politically and eco- 
nomically, wasa defeat as regards the intellectual 
sphere: the year 1865 signihes the advent of the 
South and West into American literature. And 
such a wealth of talent appears upon the scene 
that New England resigns its former leadership 
without striking a blow, and is satisfied to main- 
tain a modest place alongside the Southern and 
Western States. henceforth there is no hegem- 
ony in American authorship. 

Whether it be an advantage or a drawback is 
a matter for inquiry, but the fact is indisputable 
that since Boston forfeited its privileges as the 
spiritual capital, press and literature in the 
United States lack a centre, guidance, models. 
Neither Washington nor New York occupies 
the place held by London and Paris in the Eng- 
lish and French literary world. The press of 
Washington 1s provincial and that of New York 
does not play a genuinely metropolitan réle 
for the nation.* The same is true, and in a far 
higher degree, of imaginative writing. 


*See J. F. Muirhead, “The Land of Contrasts,” p. 145, London, 
1899. 


18 American Literature 


Four characteristics mark the literature of 
the second period: description of environment; 
realistic depiction of details; the most copious 
use of dialect; and still a fourth thing that dis- 
tinguishes the poetry and prose of this epoch 
from its predecessors—a great, if not the great- 
est, part of the imaginative literature is contrib- 
uted by journalists to some newspaper or 
periodical. Not only do humorists like Alden, 
Anderson, Austin, Bailey, Barlow, Barr, etc., 
make their way from the editorial rooms, but 
poets of the rank of a Eugene Field, story-writers 
with the force of an Ambrose Bierce, the charm 
of an R. H. Davis, place their talents at the 
service of local journalism. This produces sur- 
prising effects in content, tone, form. Every- 
thing is of a sparkling lightness, a crisp freshness 
and gripping reality. Brevity is a prime req- 
uisite, brevity at any cost. And thus an art 
is developed which in a few stanzas exhausts 
the theme of an epic, which packs the substance 
of a novel within the limits of a feuilleton. As 
the highly developed social life of the fourteenth 
century favored the story, but at the same time 
prescribed for it certain limits conditioned by 
the receptive power of the auditors, and created 
that masterpiece of narrative art, the Italian 


The Character of American Literature 19 


tale, so we find here, springing from altogether 
different conditions, essentially the same result. 
The imaginative talent of the Americans al- 
lowed itself to be harnessed to the car of journal- 
ism. To this circumstance we are indebted for 
the richness and the variety of the American 
short story. 


4. THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF AMERICAN 
LITERATURE 


The contrast between the greatness of Ameri- 
can history and the mediocrity of American 
literature becomes in a measure comprehensible 
if one compares the stuff of American imagina- 
tive writing with that of older literatures. In 
the face of an overpowering experience we are 
struck dumb, and psychologists have long been 
familiar with the phenomenon that it is not 
the totality of an event but some detached 
incident, some insignificant detail, that causes 
an outburst of tears or laughter, joy or lamenta- 
tion. What things that robbed one of breath 
and speech confronted the European settlers 
in America! From a region deforested, culti- 
vated, tame, long since cleared of beasts of 
prey, the emigrants were suddenly thrown into 
the midst of the wildness of the American prime- 


20 American Literature 


val world. All the terrors of a night in the 
forest, which an Englishman had only thought 
of in an atavistic dream at Hallowe’en, assailed 
him here in colossal proportions; the remorseless, 
elemental cruelty of the conflict between living 
beings, which on English soil had been known 
only in a dim, almost prehistoric, past, was in the 
new environment a daily experience. And the 
clash of races, the volcanic, ever-threatening 
proximity of conquerors and conquered, the 
inhuman relation between masters and slaves— 
all this was too gigantic to be absorbed by the 
eyes of a poet, too stupendous to be molded by 
the imagination. Two hundred years and 
more had to elapse before the poets were ca- 
pable of absorbing the nature around them and 
of grasping the countless problems arising 
from the medley of races, temperaments, and 
creeds. 

The idea of making Indians the subject of 
imaginative creation was first conceived by 
foreigners, not by Americans. This accords 
with the thoughts just expressed: Voltaire and 
Chateaubriand were sufficiently distant from 
the aborigines not to allow themselves to be 
overpowered by the unprecedentedness of the 
phenomenon. But the Indians of those writers 


The Character of American Literature 21 


are not drawn from life, and the interest aroused 
by them was due primarily not to the art of the 
portrayal, but to their philosophico-sociological 
aspect; the Indians were idealized in order to 
verify the doctrine of the innate goodness of 
human nature. “We savages are better people 
after all!’? The American writer, Sarah Went- 
worth Morton, frankly expressed this in the 
double title of her Indian romance: “‘Quabi; or 
the Virtues of Nature.’”’ Cooper was the first 
to be stirred by the artistic impulse in depicting 
the Indians, and—as Indian research has shown 
—his work was based upon thorough knowledge. 
After the unexpected success of the Leather- 
stocking Tales many treated the inviting sub- 
ject-matter, but none with Cooper’s freshness 
and temperament. 

The romance “Ramona,” by Helen Hunt 
Jackson (1831-1885), is marked by a strong 
philanthropic flavor. While the cruelties against 
the negroes aroused the indignation and com- 
passion of the entire world, the wrongs perpe- 
trated against the Indians were wholly disre- 
garded. The blacks were deprived of their 
freedom; the redskins of their soil and con- 
sequently of the means of existence. But the 
ill-treatment of the negroes was a thing of daily 


22 American Literature 


observation in the midst of Christian civiliza- 
tion; the robbing of the Indians was carried on 
silently, at a distance from the great centres of 
population and the highways of commerce. 

All the more laudable was the zealous advo- 
cacy of the woman who had the courage to inter- 
cede for the “savages,” directly in the work “‘A 
Century of Dishonor” (1881) and indirectly in 
the romance “ Ramona’”’ (1884). 

When Longfellow wrote “Hiawatha,” he 
was by no means intent upon artistic observa- 
tion and portrayal; his chief object was to fix 
the spirit, the real essence of the vanishing race. 
As accorded best with his purpose, he took his 
raw material from erudite literature, namely, 
Henry R. Schoolcraft’s work, “Algic Re- 
searches.” 

The negroes had already been depicted by 
W. G. Sims in 1835, as well as by E. A. Poe in a 
number of sketches; but their real discovery for 
literature was the work of Harriet Beecher 
Stowe in: 1862. Had ~ Uncle Toms Canin. 
never been written, who knows whether Joel 
Chandler Harris would have made such a loving 
study of the negroes? 

A genuinely American subject is the psychol- 
ogy of the Demos, the problem of how its in- 


a 


The Character of American Literature 23 


dividual members are constituted and how they 
go about the task of making the democratic 
machine serviceable to their interests. The 
novel “Democracy,” dating from 1880, of which 
Henry Adams, the historian, is the author; Paul 
Leicester Ford’s ‘The Honorable Peter Ster- 
ling and What People Thought of Him” (1894); 
and Winston Churchill’s more recent novel, 
“Mr. Crewe’s Career,” are excellent models of 
their kind. 

Financial speculation, which in America 
transcends anything that has gone before, has 
frequently formed the theme of representation, 
but even Frank Norris (1870-1902) did not 
measure up to his theme. That highly gifted 
story-teller, whose early death was such a great 
loss to America and to the Anglo-Saxon world 
in general, had no political or moralizing pur- 
poses in view; it was art pure and simple that 
floated before his mental vision, art, it may be, 
of the Parisian formula of that time, but never- 
theless art. He saw the endless wheatfields 
bounded only by the encircling sky, those veri- 
table, inexhaustible gold mines, the last to be 
discovered in the Far West; he took a deep 
interest in the sowing and reaping; the immortal 
spirit of Mother Earth seized him like a revela- 


24 American Literature 


tion, and he wrote ‘‘The Epic of the Wheat.’’* 
Feudal service, compulsory labor, negro slavery 
itself, were not so dreadful as the struggle de- 
scribed by Norris of the wheat-growers against 
the unescapable, crushing, octopus-arms of cor- 
ruption. 


*“The Octopus.” —“ The Pit.”—The epic was conceived as a 
trilogy, but the author did not live to finish the third volume. 


CHAPTER At 
THE FIRST PROSE WRILERS 


1. THE name of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), 
who enjoyed universal fame in an exalted sphere, 
has thus far stood the triple test of death, time, 
and totally changed conditions. To his coun- 
trymen he appears the most distinguished rep- 
resentative of the eighteenth century, despite 
such remarkable phenomena as Frederick II., 
Emperor Joseph, Voltaire; to us outsiders he 
seems the embodiment of sound common sense, 
robust, middle-class morality, clear-sighted ex- 
pediency, political efiiciency, the spirit of the nat- 
ural scientist—in brief, of all the qualities that 
are generally looked upon as Yankee char- 
acteristics. If not the greatest figure of the 
age of enlightenment, he stands among the 
greatest; and though his “ Autobiography”’ does 
not rank as a classic outside his own country, 
though his popular wisdom does not enjoy the 
esteem among us of Hebel’s ‘“‘Schatzkastlein,” 
for example, yet the pithiness, the indestructible 
25 


26 American Literature 


soundness of his prose, have sufficed to main- 
tain for him, in Germany also, a high degree of 
popularity. The good-natured masterfulness 
in all his writings, which says quite clearly, 
“Poor humanity, I know you, but I love you all 
the same,” constitutes the real salt of his humor, 
and it is this that keeps him fresh to the pres- 
ent day. Franklin, who by his incomparable 
diplomatic successes demonstrated in practice 
that he eminently understood how to deal with 
men, has bequeathed to us in his letters, in his 
“Poor Richard’s Almanac,” and in his proverbs, 
a veritable treasury of wise maxims—if one but 
knows how to read them. His oft-quoted letter 
of recommendation might profitably be com- 
mitted to memory by every man in public life: 


PARIS, 2 April, 1977. 
Sir, 

The bearer of this, who is going to America, 
presses me to give him a letter of recommen- 
dation, though I know nothing of him, not even 
his name. This may seem extraordinary, but 
I assure you it is not uncommon here. Some- 
times, indeed, one unknown person brings an- 
other equally unknown, to recommend him; and 
sometimes they recommend one another! As 
to this gentleman, I must refer you to himself 
for his character and merits, with which he is 


The First Prose Writers 27 


certainly better acquainted than I can possibly 
be. I recommend him, however, to those 
civilities which every stranger, of whom one 
knows no harm, has a right to; and I request 
you will do him all the good offices, and show 
him all the favor, that, on further acquaintance, 
you shall find him to deserve. 
I have the honor to be, etc., 
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 


Of his pithy sayings we cite a few examples: 


He is ill clothed who is bare of virtue. 

Beware of meat twice boiled, and an old foe 
reconciled. 

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the 
mouth of a wise man is in his heart. 

He that is rich need not live sparingly, and 
he that can live sparingly need not be rich. 

He that waits upon fortune is never sure of 
a dinner. 

A house without woman or firelight is like 
a body without soul or spirit. 

Kings and bears often worry their keepers. 

Light purse, heavy heart. 

He’s a fool that makes his doctor his heir. 

Ne’er take a wife till thou hast a house (and 
a fire) to put her in. 

To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals. 

He that drinks fast pays slow. 


28 American Literature 


Franklin’s short, popular pieces, which remind 
one most vividly of Engel’s “Der Philosoph 
fiir die Welt”? and of Peter Hebel’s “Schatz- 
kastlein,’’ mentioned before, have been incorpo- 
rated as bagatelles into the firm substance of 
American philosophy; some have furnished the 
English tongue with new expressions (“he has 
an axe to grind”’; “‘you have paid too dear for 
your whistle’’). With the parable of Jacques 
Montrésor, which is characteristic of Franklin’s 
attitude as a man of the world as well as of his 
style, we shall conclude our brief sketch: 

“An officer named Montrésor, a worthy man, 
was very ill. The curate of his parish, thinking 
him likely to die, advised him to make his peace 
with God, that he might be received into Para- 
dise. ‘I have not much uneasiness on the sub- 
ject,’ said Montrésor, ‘for I had a vision last 
night which has perfectly tranquillized my 
mind.’ ‘What vision have you had?’ said the 
priest. ‘1 was,’ replied Montrésor, at the 
gate of Paradise, with a crowd of people who 
wished to enter, and St. Peter inquired of every 
one to what religion he belonged. One an- 
swered, “I am a Roman Catholic.” ‘‘ Well,” said 
St. Peter, “enter, and take your place there 
among the Catholics.” Another said he was of 


The First Prose Writers 29 
the Church of England. ‘ Well,” said the Saint, 


“enter, and place yourself among the Anglicans.” 
Athird said he was a Quaker. “Enter,” said St. 
Peter, ‘“‘and take your place among the Quakers.” 
At length, my turn being come, he asked me of 
What ‘relision | was, 9 Alas) Said 1). poor 
i is Ding 
said the Saint; “I know not where to place you; 
but enter nevertheless, and place yourself where 
woucan. | 

2. Washington Irving (1783-1859) is famed 
among Americans, particularly among New 
Yorkers, as the author of “A History of New 
York by Diedrich Knickerbocker” (1809), that 
burlesque which in form is a reminder of the 
pseudonymous publications of Chatterton’s time, 
while in substance it is not much more than the 


merry conceit of an original humorist, a mixture 


Jacques Montrésor has none.’ 


of harmless satire and effective caricature. 
Irving ostensibly discovers the unpublished 
writings of a Dutch investigator, Diedrich 
Knickerbocker, who busied himself with the 
history of the Dutch settlement of New Am- 
sterdam, the New York of to-day, and he exer- 
cises the pious duty of an editor upon these 
literary remains. In the resulting book the 
heroic feats of the settlers are depicted as though 


30 American Literature 


in a comic epic. The Americans have doubtless 
overrated this merry but not specially witty 
performance; understanding of the local allu- 
sions made it easier for them to seize all the 
points intended to be made by the writer. But 
the spirit of a great satirist hovers over the 
work, the spirit to which we owe the creation 
of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. 

Among Europeans Irving is known chiefly 
through his “Sketch Book,’’ which appeared 
ten years after the “History of New York.” It 
consists of chats, sketches, tales, experiences, 
conceits, now fantastic, now sentimental, scarcely 
ever of any importance, but always most care- 
fully elaborated. 

The contents are as varied as would be the 
thoughts of a writer who travels leisurely from 
place to place, sojourns where he finds it agree- 
able, and sketches what strikes him. Most of 
the graceful pages originated in England, where 
Irving had a genial home with his brothers, and 
where he spent many years after 1815. He 
describes a visit to Roscoe, the historian, in 
Liverpool, chats about rural life in England, 
writes in elegiac tones about the royal poet of the 
“King’s Quair,”’ dreams in the hallowed spaces 
of Westminster Abbey, makes a detour to 


The First Prose Writers 31 


Stratford-upon-Avon, tries in a number of 
sketches to fix the English spirit of Christmas, 
reflects upon the change of taste in literature, 
relates the poignant story of the widow and her 
son, jots down a characteristic of John Bull; and 
in the midst of all these commonplaces, as a 
side-issue as it were, he gives us those splendid 
productions, which may perhaps be termed the 
first examples of the American local tale—the 
tale of the soil—‘*‘ Rip van Winkle” and “The 
Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The story of the 
indolent dreamer Rip, who, in order to escape 
from his Xantippe, wanders for days along the 
Hudson in the lonely gorges of the Catskill 
Mountains, and on his return to the village 
is not recognized by anybody and does not 
recognize any one himself, is familiar the world 
over; Rip van Winkle is a winged name like 
Falstaff or Tartuffe. 

We can hardly understand to-day why the 
“Sketch Book” was so specially admired by 
Irving’s contemporaries, why the rigorous critic 
of the Edinburgh Review praised it to the skies, 
why Byron learned it almost by heart; what 1s 
certain is that no other writer did as much to 
eradicate England’s depreciation of everything 
American, on the one hand, and American 


32 American Literature 


animosities against the mother country on the 
other. It is no exaggeration to say that his 
sketch of Westminster Abbey and of Stratford 
induced thousands of Americans to visit those 
hallowed spots. 

Irving’s productions after those first-fruits of 
his pen—‘‘ Bracebridge Hall,” 1822; “Tales of 
a Traveller,” 1824; “Life and Voyages of Colum- 
bus,” 1828; “‘The Conquest of Granada,” 1829; 
“The Companions of Columbus,” 1831; “The 
Alhambra,” 1832; ‘“The Life of Oliver Gold- 
smith,”’ 1849; “Mahomet and His Successors,” 
1850; “The Life of George Washington,” 1855- 
1859—were intended almost exclusively for 
American readers. ‘They were in part scholarly 
efforts in the style of the Edinburgh Review; 
they were certainly not European literature. 
He revealed to those of his countrymen to whom 
the fruits of research were not otherwise ac- 
cessible the picturesque splendor of the Moham- 
medan world—ortentalists and poets had done 
that for Europe many decades before. 

3. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) 1s 
appreciated among us to-day chiefly by boys 
and girls, but about eighty years ago, and for a 
long time after, he was the most widely read 
author in the world. ‘The inventor of the elec- 


The First Prose Writers 33 


tric telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse, said in the 
year 0833: 2 In every city of Hurope that 
visited, the works of Cooper were conspicuously 
placed in the windows of every bookshop. They 
are published, as soon as he produces them, in 
thirty-four different places in Europe. They 
have been seen by American travellers in the 
languages of Turkey and Persia, in Constan- 
tinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan.’”* 

Cooper, who had passed his thirtieth year 
before he began to write, bequeathed to poster- 
ity a library of sixty-seven volumes; from the 
merciless winnower, lime, only five have issued 
as wheat,t the Leatherstocking Tales: ‘The 
Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna,” 
1823; ““The Last of the Mohicans,” 1826; “‘The 
Prairie, a Tale,’’ 1827; ““The Pathfinder, or the 
Inland Sea,’ 1840; “The Deerslayer, or the 
First War Path,” 1841. 

The chronology of these works demands the 
sequence given above; we find thus that the hero 
of the five novels, the hunter Natty Bumppo, 
was first pictured by Cooper in the years of his 


*Th. Stanton, “A Manual of American Literature,” 1909. 


{Besides these the books that are read are “The Spy,’ 1821, 
and “The Pilot,” 1823. The first-named novel has the War of 
Independence as its background; the second, in which Cooper 
turns to account his recollections of his service in the navy, por- 
trays the adventures of John Paul Jones. 


34 American Literature 


manhood and old age, until, through the insa- 
tiability of his readers, the successful author 
conceived the idea of adding a narrative of his 
youth. If one wishes to enjoy the whole prose 
poem, however, unconcernedly like a child, and 
to follow the hero from his beginnings to the 
close of his life, he must observe a different order 
in reading them: (1) “Uhe Deerslayer, (2) 
“The Last of the Mohicans,” (3) “The Path- 
finder,” (4) “The Pioneers,” (5) ~The Fraime © 

It is not very difficult to understand the im- 
mense popularity of the Leatherstocking Tales 
and the fame of the writer in the first half of the 
nineteenth century. First and foremost, the 
longing for the dreamed-of golden age of primi- 
tive life met him halfway. The civilized world 
was not yet so far removed from the sentimental 
visions of Rousseau; sensitive souls still wept 
over Paul and Virginia; and even Chateau- 
briand’s imitations elicited boundless admira- 
tion. For that generation, keyed to the glad 
tidings of a return to primitiveness, Natty 
Bumppo, a hunter living among the redskins, 
averse to all polish but imbued with the noblest 
humanity, was the embodiment of their ideal 
of a man who owes all to nature, nothing to 
civilization. Cooper, who was only moder- 


The First Prose Writers 35 


ately gifted with the faculty of imaginative 
reproduction, endowed the hero of the Leather- 
stocking Tales very richly from the treasure- 
house of his own spiritual life; it is owing to this 
that of all Cooper’s characters, Natty Bumppo 
most strongly produces the illusion of reality. 

Cooper himself, as a member of a family of 
distinction, was deeply imbued with the prej- 
udices of the modern social order. Observe, 
for example, how he prepares the reader, how 
he cajoles him, before he ventures to enlist his 
sympathies for the children of nature. He in- 
troduces the good-natured giant of the primeval 
forest, Henry March, with the apology that 
though, of course, not free from roughness such 
as a conflict with savage nature naturally pro- 
duces, the grandeur of so splendid a stature 
prevented the man from appearing altogether 
‘“common’’—that is, the man of the people may 
be forgiven his uncorrupted soul on account of 
his physical perfection. 

But in his inmost being Cooper was a child 
of nature, an only half-tamed denizen of the 
woods—a survival in the midst of the conven- 
tions of a feeble time. His resistance to the 
constraint of the prevailing manners manifested 
itself even in his schooldays; and his innumer- 


36 American Literature 


able feuds with the press and the public show 
that he could never completely adapt himself 
to the artificial social order—that is to say, he 
could never quite suppress his strong individu- 
ality for the sake of peace. 

When a young fellow he was expelled from 
college; later, at the height of his fame, he in- 
curred the displeasure of young America and 
then of the entire nation. And why? He had 
travelled in Europe and by his fearless criticism 
had attracted unfavorable attention. Upon 
his return home he wrote a work in which he 
held up the mirror to his countrymen. Where- 
upon all the papers and politicians fell upon 
him, and he endured ten years of the bitterest 
obloquy. This could only happen to a man 
who cannot accommodate himself to circum- 
stances, who does not allow his convictions to be 
circumscribed, who must live his life in his own 
way. Hence his comprehension not only of 
Natty Bumppo, but likewise of the Indians. 
In comparison with the unquestioning §self- 
righteousness which so generally characterizes 
- the whites, Cooper’s attitude toward the colored 
races is that of an unprejudiced philosopher. 
Leatherstocking, through whose lips Cooper ex- 
presses his views on the race question, says: 


The First Prose Writers 7 


“God made us all, white, black, and red; and, no 
doubt, had his own wise intentions in coloring 
us differently. Still, he made us in the main, 
much the same in feelin’s; though I’ll not deny 
that he gave each race its gifts. A white man’s 
gifts are Christianized, while a redskin’s are more 
for the wilderness. ‘Thus, it would be a great 
offence for a white man to scalp the dead; where- 
as it’s a signal vartue in an Indian. ‘Then, ag’in, 
a white man cannot amboosh women and chil- 
dren in war, while a redskin may.” 

The humanitarian sentiment that we are all 
descended from one father, in spite of all dif- 
ferences of race and conditions of life, is Cooper’s 
profoundest conviction. And in sharing the 
life of his two Indian friends, Chingachgook and 
Uncas, Natty Bumppo does not show a trace 
of the superiority which characterizes the atti- 
tude of the white man toward the Indian. Just 
the contrary. It is upon this that the charge of 
idealizing the barbarous, inhuman Indians, so 
long held up against him, rests. Cooper from 
his childhood up was acquainted with a great 
number of Indians, half tamed, who possessed 
all the virtues which he depicts; and research 
has shown that though they indulged in scalp- 
ing and were merciless in pursuit of their ene- 


38 American Literature 


mies, they possessed many virtues—above all, 
hospitality and a spirit of self-sacrifice, not only 
for wife and child, but for a strange friend. 
Against the male characters in Cooper’s novel, 
“The Deerslayer,”’ it might be objected that they 
are sophisticated and rectilinear, that they follow 
prescribed rules, as it were, in speech and action; 
that they are always, under all circumstances, 
the same. This does not apply to the women. 
Judith Hutter is a maiden instinct with life, with 
all the whims and capriciousness of a temperamen- 
tal nature, consistent only in her inconsistency, a 
Cleopatra of the American forest, if it be per- 
missible to compare the small with the great. 
Cooper has not a strong sense of humor, or he 
could not have failed to see how much of the 
comic he has involuntarily attached to the char- 
acter of Hetty, otherwise so touching a figure. 
The unselfish, lovable, sensitive, deeply pious be- 
ing is regarded and treated by her rude associ- 
ates as feeble-minded precisely on account of 
those qualities. In reality, however, she is the 
only one in the romance who acts wisely, and 
the only one who displays any cleverness, in 
short, the only normally sensible person in the 
whole company. And this girl, pictured as such 
a naive creature, says of herself every time she 


The First Prose Writers 39 


does anything unusually clever: “ But you know 
I am feeble-minded!’’* 

Was Cooper a poet? 

Creative genius, the impulse and ability to 
portray people artistically, he possessed, as has 
been mentioned, only in a minor measure. But 
he possessed to a rare degree those attributes 
which are common to all original imaginative 
writers: a highly developed sensibility for all of 
nature’s phenomena; the most acute, even if un- 
conscious, power of observation, which seizes 
every detail; finally, the faculty of thinking in 
images. These advantages were enjoyed by 
Natty Bumppo, who obtained them from his 
creator, Cooper. Natty’s hearing is so marvel- 
ous that he distinguishes the real cry of the 
hawk from the Indian’s imitation, a nuance 
which often escapes the animals themselves. 
His eye discovers a trail which a hundred chil- 
dren of civilization have sought for hours in vain. 
The changing moods of woods and wilds in the 
Leatherstocking Tales are lyric masterpieces; 
these alone would entitle Cooper to the name 
of poet. 


*See, for example, the eighteenth chapter. 


CHAPTER, ITI 
AMERICAN POETRY 


Tue Puritan spirit which inspires the whole 
body of American literature, not excluding the 
humorists, is most clearly evidenced in the 
verses of Whittier, in the novels of Harriet 
Beecher Stowe; but Bryant also, and the host 
of minor poets, are essentially of the same type. 
A more penetrating insight into American im- 
aginative writing, notably the productions of 
the Northeast, 1s impossible without a knowl- 
edge of what the Puritan spirit in America 
signified, what it stimulated in daily life, what 
it repressed, what it created, what it ruthlessly 
destroyed. 


1. THE NATURE OF AMERICAN PURITANISM 


Calvinism is the natural theology of the dis- 
inherited; it never flourished, therefore, any- 
where as it did in the barren hills of Scotland 
and in the wilds of North America. The Cal- 
vinist feels himself surrounded by naught but 

40 


American Poetry 41 


hostile powers; his life is a perpetual conflict 
from his very birth. The farmer, who has to 
keep up a constant struggle against untoward 
phenomena, against the refractory soil, against 
drought and frost, against caterpillars and a 
host of other insect plagues; who constantly 
sees his well-considered and most persistent 
efforts thwarted by laws whose operations he 
can never calculate in advance, and which give no 
evidence of consideration for his good intentions 
or compassion for his failures—he is naturally 
inclined to the belief from the outset that God, 
who created the world, is a well-meaning but 
unquestionably a rigorous, cold being who rules 
the world with some great purpose unknown to 
the inhabitants of the earth. The weal and woe 
of mankind may perhaps enter into the plan, 
and they may not. God, who, to other be- 
levers in Christianity, is a loving Father, is to 
the Calvinist a hostile Presence, threatening 
doom—unless he should be found worthy of 
grace. Who can know that he is so? And 
should he find no grace, he is doomed to ever- 
lasting perdition. 

The famous Jonathan Edwards, the great- 
est Calvinist luminary on the soil of the New 
_ World, says in a sermon bearing the consoling 


42 American Literature 


title of Men Naturally God’s Enemies: “A 
natural man has a heart like the heart of a 
devil.) sore heart -of 4 acura man 
is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, 
cold corpse is of vital heat.” And in an- 
other sermon upon Sinners in the Hands of an 
Angry God: “The God that holds you over the 
pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some 
loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and 
is dreadfully provoked . . . you are ten 
thousand times as abominable in his eyes as 
the most hateful and venomous serpent 1s in 


ours... soy Yow hang by. aslender thread, 
with the flames of divine wrath flashing about 
ion «su Ufeyow ery 20 Ged to pry cod, fe 
will be so far from pitying you in your doleful 
case . . . that he'll only tread you under- 
foots; he’ lcerush our your blood ana 


make it fly and it shall be sprinkled on his gar- 
ments so as to stain all his raiment. - 

What an effect this doctrine of terror had 
upon sensitive natures is described by one of the 
initiated, a minister’s daughter. 

“What have I not read and suffered at the 
hands of theologians? How many lonely hours, 
day after day, have I bent the knee in fruitless 


prayer that God would grant me this great, 


American Poetry 43 


unknown grace, for without it how dreary 1s 
life! 

“We are in ourselves so utterly helpless— 
life is so hard, so inexplicable, that we stand in 
perishing need of some helping hand, some sen- 
sible, appreciable connection with God. And 
yet for years every cry of misery, every breath 
of anguish, has been choked by the theological 
proofs of theology—that God is my enemy, or 
that I am his; that every effort I make toward 
him but aggravates my offence; and that this 
unknown gift, which no child of Adam ever 
did compass of himself, is so completely in my 
own power that I am every minute of my life 
to. blame for mot possessing: it.” / (lars 
riet Beecher Stowe, “Oldtown Folks,’ 1, page 
250)) 

For the poor, for the stepchildren of Nature 
and Fate, this creed was a most potent, because 
personal, truth. An enemy, not a loving Father, 
had given them their accursed existence, and 
thus it was a consolation to know that the 
favored, the lucky ones of this world, were ad- 
vancing toward eternal damnation, while they, 
who were languishing in this life, would be the 
first in the life everlasting. The doctrine of 
election by grace, of a divine aristocracy is, as 


44 American Literature 


the historian Bancroft once observed, the most 
exalted conceit of human pride. The needy 
said to the privileged classes: ““You point to 
your fifteen ancestors? We, the elect, were ap- 
pointed by God the aristocracy of the world 
from the beginning of creation. Whose nobility 
is more ancient?” 

The farmers of New England, like the Scotch 
cotters of to-day, were extremely well versed in 
theology. Farmer Marvyn, as Harriet Beecher 
Stowe depicts him, tilled the soil with his own 
hands, but in his leisure hours and on Sundays 
he was an eager, thoughtful reader whose at- 
tention scarcely any production worthy of 
notice, in Biblical exegesis or theological lore 
in general, would escape. He did not read un- 
critically; his books were full of marginal notes 
of a polemical character. The sons—and daugh- 
ters—followed this model, and independence of 
thought became thus the inalienable heritage 
of every Puritan. 

The Puritanic way of observing the Sabbath 
made the Lord’s day a torment instead of a rec- 
reation. Two illustrations from Alice Morse 
Earle’s book, ‘‘The Sabbath in Puritan New 
England,” will suffice: 

“Jonathan and Susannah Smith were fined 


American Poetry 45 


’ 


5 s. for smiling during service.” “Two lovers, 
John Lewis and Sarah Chapman, were accused 
of and tried for sitting together on the Lord’s 
day under an apple tree.” 

Puritan New England, like Scotland in the 
more modern history of the British polity, con- 
stituted the steely point of the nation’s spear. 
The hard, niggardly, refractory soil of the New 
England States has contributed to the peculiar 
mixture which is termed the American national 
character the elements to which it preéminently 
owes its qualities of endurance, of tenacity, of 
conquering force. Efficiency—“‘faculty” in the 
language of New England—is synonymous there 
with virtue; all the conceptions associated with 
the Greek arete and the Latin vzirtus become 
vivid to a Yankee of the old stamp on mention 
of the word “‘efficiency.”’ ‘To efficiency every- 
thing is possible, everything attainable; for 
efficiency there are no insurmountable obstacles, 
no impassable gulfs. And efficiency is “elected”’ 
to rule the weak and helpless, to force them into 
its service. Puritanic efficiency takes the lead 
in the American States as the Doric “virtue” 
vanquished the Ionic genius, as the barrenness 
of the Judaic chalk-cliffs brought under sub- 


jection the wealth and abundance of Samaria. 


46 American Literature 


The ambition of all the gifted school-children 
of New England, even the poorest, turned 
toward a university education and literary re- 
nown. Harvard College was the new Jerusa- 
lem, the ideal of all aspiring youth. Benjamin 
Franklin and J. G. Whittier longed for that 


high aim without ever attaining it. 


2. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF PURITAN. POETRY 


All that made the settlers in New England 
irresistible—their intense religiosity, the un- 
alterable conviction of their election, their mod- 
est wants and along with this a constant care 
for the morrow, their humbleness toward God 
and their inflexible pride toward man, their 
feeling for freedom and independence, their 
strong sense of justice—were distinguishing 
marks of these poets, genuine descendants of 
those Puritan forefathers. This or that one 
among them may on the surface have lifted 
himself above this Calvinist heritage; but in the 
blood, in marrow and muscle, the Puritan spirit, 
ineradicable, lives on. One should like to re- 
gard the freethinker, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
and the naturalist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, as 
completely emancipated, but they themselves 
confess that they are subject to the Puritan 


American Poetry 47 


tradition.* What Bryant said of himself ap- 
plies to the whole group: what they had seen 
and heard as children at home clung to their 
souls unto death. 

That is the strongest side of their poetry. 
When they sing of liberty and equality their 
song is as irresistible as the sword of their 
ancestors. Bryant’s ode, The Antiquity of 
Freedom, rises high above all the English odes 
of older or more modern times. ‘To these poets 
the fight against the slavery of the Southern 
States was a matter of sacred earnestness, its 
most fundamental basis unselfish conviction; 
that is why of the countless poems written on 
behalf of the emancipation of the slaves those of 
the Puritan group alone have poetic content, the 
ring of genuine, personal feeling; such, for ex- 
ample, are Bryant’s Our Country’s Call} and 
The Death of Slavery,t Expostulation,§$ Massa- 
chusetts to Virginia, etc. And with this spirit 
of independence they did not shrink from turn- 
ing against their own forefathers. Puritan 


*Nathaniel Hawthorne, “ The Scarlet Letter.’”? Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, “Over the Teacups.” 

tC. H. Page, “The Chief American Poets,” p. 24. 

tStedman, “An American Anthology,”’ p. 66. 

§Page, p. 262. 

(Page, p. 270. 


48 American Literature 


poets and prose writers are never more indig- 
nant, never more powerful, than when they tell of 
the spiritual pride and the rage of persecution 
of the first settlers. “This flaming wrath makes 
Whittier’s Cassandra Southwick* one of his most 
gripping poems. 

A leading characteristic of the Puritan group 
of poets is the conviction of their election and 
divine consecration: they have, like Cadmon, 
the Saxon shepherd in Bede’s legend, been in- 
spired in order that they might announce what 
is high and holy to mankind. The calling of 
poet is to them, therefore, a high and holy call- 
ing, an unsought, onerous office like that of the 
prophets of old. 

Their love of freedom is intimately allied 
with pride in their American home, the home 
that their forefathers wrested from the wilder- 
ness, that they themselves wrung from the op- 
pressor’s hand. That is why the patriotic 
poetry of that circle flourished with such par- 
ticular brilliance. Bryant’s song of defiance, 
Oh Mother of a Mighty Race,t is an excellent 
example of this type of American lyric. 
oC ees 267. 


t“Bryant, The Poet,” Page, p. 29. Emerson, Merlin, Page, 
Por, 


{Stedman, p. 62. 


American Poetry 49 


The energy and unrelaxing industry of the 
New England Puritans, bred of the ceaseless 
struggle with the most adverse conditions, and, 
coupled with these, the iron purpose—clear, 
triumphant—stamp their literature as well. 
Trifling talk, for the sake of talking, is not a 
thing for the Puritans; there is ever some pur- 
pose in view. Instruction, edification, amuse- 
ment, persuasion—some effect is always aimed 
at. Ifa spirit as dreamy as Longfellow proclaims 
the doctrine “‘In the beginning was the deed,”’ 
we may assuredly characterize this as a com- 
mon trait of the Puritan group. The famous 
village blacksmith with his daily “Something 
attempted, something done” is the American 
ideal. 

The poets of New England occupy a distinc- 
tive position in American literature, as does 
their special section among the other divisions 
of the United States. The states of Maine, 
New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, 
Rhode Island, and Connecticut were the real 
starting-point of the North American Republic, 
the chief seat of intellectual life, and the only 
ones—Virginia stands by itself in every respect 
—that can point to an old civilization and are 
fully conscious of this aristocracy. There are 


50 American Literature 


probably not many families in England that 
have occupied the same house continuously 
since the third decade of the seventeenth century 
and can show an unbroken pedigree of three 
hundred years. Such, however, 1s the case in 
many farms of New England, for example in 
the home of the poet Whittier. 

In feeling these Puritan lyrists remind one 
of the greatest writers of song*; Goethe’s longing 
for peace found no profounder expression than 
is voiced in Longfellow’s Hymn to the Night. 
What the Americans lack is the divine harmony 
which makes a poem a song. The music of 
verse. is vrouchsated: to: Hardly.assimele one 
them. Bryant is the most melodious of the 
entire group, Emerson the least gifted with the 
sense of sound among them all. 

That in English poetry less attention 1s paid 
to the purity of rhyme than in other languages, 
‘sa familiar fact; the so-called sight-rhymes like 
love and move, are and care, are a license to 
which even eminent talent resorts. But rarely 





*The deepest, most genuine feelings of the Puritan poets are 
manifested in their lyrics. This 1s most clearly perceptible in the 
minor poets. James Gates Percival (1795-1856) was, 1n his most 
comprehensive and ambitious work, Prometheus (1820), an imita- 
tor of Byron and Shelley; 1n his lyric poems, on the contrary, his 
verse was of an independent, Puritanic character. His patriotic 


New England would alone be evidence enough that he belongs to 
that group. 


American Poetry SI 


do they appear in such disturbing abundance 
as with Emerson. ‘The elegy on the death of his 
son (Threnody), so fraught with feeling and 
thought, 1s, therefore, to be read with the eye 
alone; to the ear dissonances like mourn— 
return, man—vain, are intolerable. 


3. AMERICAN POETRY BEFORE BRYANT 


William Cullen Bryant is designated by Eng- 
lishmen as the first American poet, and the Amer- 
icans are not disinclined to subscribe to that 
judgment. And since the poem Thanatopsis, 
upon which this judgment is based, appeared in 
1817, that year is straightway designated as the 
natal year of American poetry. This sort of 
criticism and literary history presupposes iron- 
bound rulesof literary esthetics. For the present 
such do not exist for us. One cannot, therefore, 
go so far as to annihilate at a stroke the whole 
of the somewhat ample body of poetry before 
Bryant. 

Even from the wholly Puritan period, 
shunned by the Muses and the Graces, there are 
many verses worthy of being revived.* The 
Puritan hymn, whose boldness and hard force 


*W. B. Otis, “ American Verse,” 1625-1807, New York, 1909, 


52 American Literature 


is a characteristic expression of American-Pur- 
itan art, dates from that sterile time. 


Let children hear the mighty deeds 
Which God performed of old, 
Which in our younger years we saw, 


And which our fathers told. 


He bids us make his glories known, 
His works of power and grace; 

And we'll convey his wonders down 
Through every rising race. 


Our lips shall tell them to our sons, 
And they again to theirs; 

That generations yet unborn 

May teach them to their heirs. 


Thus shall they learn, in God alone 
Their hope securely stands; 

That they may ne’er forget his works, 
But practise his commands. 


It is not to be wondered that the Puritan 
spirit produced no worldly songs; for the joys 
of the cup, vernal breezes, love’s rapture and 
pain, were tabooed as subjects for poetry. It 
is, on the contrary, a cause for astonishment 
that even the rigid discipline of New England 
was unable to kill the love song. One such, 


American Poetry 53 


gathered from the mouth of the people, has been 
set down by Irving Bacheller in “‘ Eben Holden.” 
Its rarity alone should justify its reproduction: 


I was goin’ t’ Salem one bright summer day, 
When I met a fair maiden a-goin’ my way. 
Oh, my fallow, faddeling fallow, faddel away. 


An’ many a time I[ had seen her before, 
But I never dare tell ’er the love that | bore. 
Oh, my fallow, etc. 


“Oh, where are you goin’, my purty fair maid?”’ 
“Qh, sir, I am goin’ t’ Salem,” she said. 
Oh, my fallow, etc. 


“Qh, why are you goin’ so farina day? 
Very warm is the weather and long is the way.” 
Oh, my fallow, etc. 


“Oh, sir, I’ve forgotten, I hev, I declare, 
But it’s nothin’ to eat an’ it’s nothin’ to wear.” 
Oh, my fallow, etc. 


“Oho! then I hev it, ye purty young miss! 
Ill bet it is only three words an’ a kiss.” 
Oh, my fallow, etc. 


“Young woman, young woman, oh, how will it dew 
If I go see yer lover ’n bring ’em t’ you?” 
Oh, my fallow, etc. 


54 American Literature 


“Sa very long journey,” says she, “I am told, 
An’ before ye got back they would surely be cold.” 
Oh, my fallow, etc. 


“T hev ’em right with me, I vum an’ I vow, 
An’ if you don’t object [ll deliver ’em now.” 
Oh, my fallow, ete. 


She laid her fair head all on to my breast, 
An’ ye wouldn’t know more if [ tol’ ye the rest. 
Oh, my fallow, etc. 


Philip Freneau (1752-1832) of New York, 
whose ancestors emigrated from France at the 
time of the Huguenot persecution and found 
their way to America, was remarkably versatile 
and prolific, but very uneven in temper and 
inspiration. He wrote satires, polished oc- 
casional poems in the style of Prior and the 
Cavaliers, odes, fables, translations—every- 
thing that has been prejudicial to his memory. 
But who would hesitate, had the name of the 
author remained unknown, to ascribe such 
poems as The Wild Honeysuckle or On the Ruins 
of a Country Inn* to one of the English poets of 
note of the eighteenth century? 

The political satire, McFingal, by John 


*Stedman, 3-8. 


American Poetry 55 


Trumbull (1752-1831), can creditably stand the 
test of comparison with its model, Butler’s 
Hudibras, and the epic of Timothy Dwight 
(1752-1817), The Conquest of Canaan, was 
praised by Cowper. 

If there were no lyrics and no epics, measured 
by the Greek standard, there was, at any rate, 
poetry. And the further we advance from the 
days of political nonage, the richer is the per- 
centage of precious metals in the mass of dead 
lode. To be sure, Alexander Wilson is frankly 
prosaic, directly utilitarian. He sounds the 
praises of the feathered songster not only be- 
cause it heralds the spring, but because it 
destroys the noxious canker-worm and cater- 
pillar. George P. Norris sings of commonplace 
feelings in schoolboy verses, Peabody writes 
dull elegies, Prentice riots in a leaden plethora 
of words, Lydia Sigourney, so highly lauded in 
her time, is rhetorical, didactic, pompous. For 
that matter, America is, indeed, inclined to 
homely moralizing, as is evidenced by the long- 
lived admiration for Tupper’s Proverbial P hilos- 
ophy.* The poem, Home, Sweet Home, which 
has immortalized the mediocre J. H. Payne 


ach Leon Kellner, “Die Englische Literatur im Zeitalter der 
Konigin Viktoria,” Leipzig, 1909, p. 369. 


56 American Literature 


(1791-1852), is an illustration of that common- 
place verse which even after Bryant's advent 
was regarded as poetry in America: 


Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, 
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home; 
A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there, 
Which, seek through the world, is ne’er met with 
elsewhere. 
Home, home, sweet, sweet home! 
There’s no place like home! ‘There’s no place like 
home! 


An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain; 
O give me my lowly thatched cottage again! 
The birds singing gaily, that came at my call,— 
Give me them, —and the peace of mind, dearer than 
all! 
Home, home, sweet, sweet home! 
There’s no place like home, there’s no place like 
home! 


How sweet ’tis to sit "neath a fond father’s smile, 
And the cares of a mother to soothe and beguile! 
Let others delight mid new pleasures to roam, 
But give me, oh, give me, the pleasures of home! 
Home, home, sweet, sweet home! 
There’s no place like home! There’s no place like 
home! 


American Poetry 57 


To thee I’ll return, overburdened with care; 

The heart’s dearest solace will smile on me there; 

No more from that cottage again will I roam; 

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home! 
Home, home, sweet, sweet home! 

There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home! 


And spirits of a higher strain followed slavishly 
in the footsteps of the English poets, Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, Southey, just then come into vogue; 
somewhat later in those of Byron, Shelley, and 
Keats; others take the German romanticists as 
models. To mention only the most eminent 
as examples: Washington Allston (1779-1843) 
reminds one of Wordsworth by his contempla- 
tive art tinged with spiritual feeling as well as by 
his preference for the unheeded small things of 
nature; the same applies to Richard Henry Dana, 
ye elder (1787-1870), and ‘Charles Sprague 
(1791-1875). Maria Gowen Brooks (1795-1845), 
in her fanciful epic, Zophiel, is completely under 
Southey’sinfluence. Edward C. Pinkney (1802- 
1828) was a disciple of Thomas Moore. 

Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), whose 
poem, Marco Bozzaris, is to the present day re- 
cited in American schools as a model of suS- 
tained diction, reminds one of Byron and Wil- 
helm Miiller in every stanza; James Abraham 


58 American Literature 


Hillhouse (1789-1841) and James Gates Percival 
(1795-1856) sought in vain to approach Shelley. 

Two stanzas from Marco Bozzaris will con- 
firm this characterization: 


At midnight, in the forest shades, 
Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band, 

True as the steel of their tried blades, 
Heroes in heart and hand. 

There had the Persian thousands stood, 

There had the glad earth drunk their blood 
On old Platza’s day; 

And now there breathed that haunted air 

The sons of sires who conquered there, 

With arm to strike and soul to dare, 
As quick, as far as they. 


An hour passed on—the Turk awoke; 
That bright dream was his last; 

He woke—to hear his sentries shriek, 

“To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!”’ 

He woke—to die midst flame, and smoke, 

And shout, and groan, and sabre-stroke, 
And death-shots falling thick and fast 

As lightnings from the mountain-cloud; 

And heard, with voice as trumpet loud, 
Bozzaris cheer his band: 

“Strike—till the last armed foe expires; 

Strike—for your altars and your fires; 

Strike—for the green graves of your sires; 
God—and your native land!” 


American Poetry 59 


And if a poet did once have an hour of illu- 
mination and succeed in giving adequate expres- 
sion to his inspiration, he spoiled his work by 
yielding to the hereditary Puritan craving for 
commentary and didacticism. Thus, for ex- 
ample, Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867), 
in his poem, Parrhasius,* relates how the 
Athenian painter, Parrhasius, observes a gray- 
haired but athletic-looking slave who has been 
exposed for sale all day and has borne every 
sort of indignity with stoical self-control. Only 
when the miserable man is alone and his muscles 
relax does his unutterable anguish show itself 
in his face. Then the artist is seized with the 
creative longing, and he has the prisoner brought 
to him that he may produce the master work 
of his career—a Prometheus from life. The 
painter has the old man chained, his scarcely 
healed wounds torn open, and has him put to 
the rack: the keener his suffering, the more does 
the artist rejoice, and when he succeeds in con- 
juring the dimming eye of the dying man upon 
the canvas, his heart exults at his triumph. f 

But the design is spoiled at the close by the 


*Stedman, p. 103. 


+The motif of the artist in whom the impulse of creation crushes 
all human emotion is used by Chamisso in his poem, Das Kruzifix 


(1830). 


60 American Literature 


poet’s wearisome sermon against boundless ai- 
bition! 

And yet in spite of all that, in spite of crudity 
and homeliness, in spite of moralizing and 
imitation, it would be unfair to pass over all 
the poetry prior to and during the time of Bry- 
ant in disdainful silence. It contains isolated 
grains of purest, golden poesy. Thomas Hast- 
ings wrote a number of religious poems which 
maintain an honorable place among the best 
of that species; Samuel Woodworth (1785- 
1842), in his melodious, heart-felt Old Oaken 
Bucket, bequeathed to American literature a 
touching remembrance of the paternal home, a 
poem still unforgotten; George Tucker (1775- 
1861) has by his one elegy, Days of My Youth, 
earned the right to be placed beside George 
Herbert or Ludwig Heinrich Holty. 

And Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820), who 
died at such an early age, and who in his am- 
bitious poem, The Culprit Fay, shows himself 
animitator of Coleridge, produced in the patri- 
otic lyric, The American Flag, a poem which, 
with its spontaneous, vigorous diction, has suc- 
cessfully defied all adverse criticism and still 
lives on to-day. The fame achieved by this 
poem is, it is true, shared by Joseph Hopkin- 


American Poetry 61 


son’s inferior, Hail, Columbia; the Star-Spangled 
Banner, by Francis Scott Key; and the unpre- 
tending America, by the clergyman, Samuel 
Francis Smith. These four poems and Yankee 
Doodle are known the world over. 


4. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 


William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was 
the son of a physician. He received the good 
education customary in Massachusetts, and 
was to devote himself to law; but he was ir- 
resistibly drawn to literature. He had already 
aroused attention as a lad of fourteen by a 
satirical poem on Jefferson; his elegy, Thana- 
topsis (1817), made him famous at one stroke. 
Unfortunately, he soon after became a journal- 
ist in New York, and the hours he could devote 
_ to art were numbered. Bryant’s first serious 
poem is a reminder in form and content, in 
melody and temper, of the long series of ele- 
gists who, in the eighteenth century, gave the 
keynote to contemplative lyric poetry and 
obtained for it a European appreciation. 
Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, Thomas 
Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard, hov- 
ered before the youthful Bryant when he 


62 American Literature 


wrote Thanatopsis; the pliantly soft blank verse 
he learned, to be sure, rather from Keats and 
Shelley. The unobtrusive, contemplative di- 
dacticism of a Cowper and Wordsworth—a 
didacticism which in Pope had taken the severe 
form of exposition and argument—combined 
with the melodious, variegated softness of the 
verse characteristic of Keats and Shelley, gives 
Bryant his distinctive place in American lyric 
poetry: 


To him who in the love of nature holds 
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks 
A various language; for his gayer hours 
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile 
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides 
Into his darker musings, with a mild 
And healing sympathy, that steals away 
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts 
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight 
Over thy spirit, and sad images 
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, 
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house, 
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;— 
Go forth, under the open sky, and list 
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around— 
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air— 
Comes a still voice—Yet a few days, and thee 
The all-beholding sun shall see no more 


American Poetry 63 


In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground, 
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, 
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist 

Thy image. 


An illustration of how Bryant gives spon- 
taneous, purpose-free expression to a phenom- 
enon of nature, but, under the influence of 
didactic tradition, provides it with an instruc- 
tive close, is the short poem, To a Waterfowl, 
which Hartley Coleridge exaggeratedly pro- 
nounced the best short poem in the English 
language, a judgment to which Matthew Arnold 
subscribed. ‘The poet sees the waterfowl cleave 
the pathless air, and glorifies the mysterious 
Power that guides the bird so unerringly to its 
unseen goal. The poem concludes thus: 


~ He who, from zone to zone, 

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, 
In the long way that I must tread alone 

Will lead my steps aright. 


It is not at all the purpose of these remarks to 
set Bryant down as an imitator or an epigone; 
only to point out his historical connections and 
spiritual relationships. A poem like The Even- 
ing Wind or Robert of Lincoln at once calls up 


64 American Literature 


Shelley; another, To the Fringed Gentian, arouses 
memories of Wordsworth. But every word of 
these lyric portrayals of moods bears the 1m- 
press of personal experience; the reader has this 
conviction irrespective of the fact that Bryant 
sings only of native birds and flowers. That 
we absorbed Wordsworth and Shelley before we 
did Bryant is not his fault. 

What is there, in the authorship of all the 
world, that is absolutely new? 

The art of the genuine poet to make every 
idea, though it has been thought a thousand 
times before, appear as new as if it had flashed 
across a human brain for the first time, 1s char- 
acteristic of Bryant in a high degree; and the 
secret of this incommunicable magic is, in his 
case, that he apprehends the most ordinary 
phenomena with the deepest, the strongest 
feelings. What an endless array of things have 
been sung and said of the concept of the past! 
Its irrevocableness, unapproachableness, relent- 
lessness, but also its generative force and 
imperishableness—poets and thinkers have told 
us all that. But on reading Bryant’s poem, 
The Past, one is thrilled by every stanza 
as if no one had ever said anything of the 


kind. 


American Poetry 65 


Bryant was fully conscious of his mastery 
of blank verse; that gave him the courage to 
translate Homer into English, to enter the lists, 
therefore, with men like Chapman and Pope— 
not to speak of more modern translators— 
and not without success. 


5. WHITTIER 


Closest to the thought and feeling of the peo- 
ple, nay, part and parcel of them, is the farmer’s 
son, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), who, 
more than any other writer, reflects the Sunday 
spirit of Puritan New England. For with the 
farmers and woodcutters of this region so scantily 
favored by nature, with the artisans and fisher- 
men, shopkeepers and teamsters, as in the case 
of all Calvinist-bred peoples—for example, the 
Scotch—we must distinguish two kinds of souls: 
on week-days the New Englander is hard, 
sober, filled with the care of making a living, a 
passion for gain, and an automatic impulse to 
hold on to what he has; he is completely bound 
up in business. On Sundays he is a different 
being: open to all noble incitements, a loving 
neighbor, a self-sacrificing citizen, filled with a 
sincere desire to show himself worthy of the 
grace of the elect. From this Sunday mood of 


66 American Literature 


the plain man of the people did all the creations 
of Whittier spring; that is why no other poet of 
New England has been so well understood and 
so widely read. 

By his family history as well as by his own 
course of life Whittier is held up to youth as a 
model of vigorous manhood, of that wondrous 
Puritan stock that subjugated America. An 
ancestor of the family was among the first 
settlers of New England. He had ten children, 
of whom five were sons, each six feet high and of 
powerful frame. The youngest of these giants 
had nine children. Of these the youngest had 
eleven children. The youngest of these was the 
father of our poet. John did not take after his 
kind. He had too little physique and too much 
spirit for a husbandman. He went to the 
city, therefore, and became a journalist, but of 
a peculiar sort, for his pen was devoted almost 
exclusively to the cause of negro emanci- 
pation. 

What brings Whittier still closer to his 
readers of to-day is the circumstance that he 
sprang from Quaker stock and was bred in the 
principles of that sect. The democratic idea 
in Puritanism, the equality of all men before 
God, was carried, in theory, by the Quakers to 


American Poetry 67 


its extreme; more than the general use of “‘thee’”’ 
they could not, of course, actually put into 
practice. Of far greater significance is it that 
they deemed it possible for every individual, 
quite independently of position, descent, edu- 
cation, course of life, to receive the “inner light” 
through the Holy Spirit. This was the strong- 
est, most consistent denial of authority; in this 
sense the Quakers were the most extreme Puri- 
tans. 

But this confidence granted to the individual 
signified an entirely new side to religion: rigidity 
of creed, intolerant orthodoxy, was superseded 
by a mild latitude. Every one was answerable, 
in his own way, for his soul’s salvation—not by 
an unchallengeable confession of faith, but by 
his mode of life, by deeds of love and justice. 
Along this road the Quakers sped centuries 
ahead of the Puritans, so closely related to them 
in creed; and, starting from premises wholly 
different from those of the age of enlighten- 
ment, they arrived at the same result—humani- 
tarlanism. 

Whittier is the poet of this humanitarianism, 
and it is this that gives him his distinctive 
place in American literature. The concluding 
stanzas of the poem, 4n Autograph, in which he 


68 American Literature 


writes his own epitaph, happily express the posi- 
tion he occupies: 


And while my words are read, 
Let this at least be said: 
‘““Whate’er his life’s defeatures, 
He loved his fellow-creatures. 


“TF of the Law’s stone table, 
To hold he scarce was able 
The first great precept fast, 
He kept for man the last. 


“Through mortal lapse and dulness 
What lacks the Eternal Fulness, 
If still our weakness can 
Love Him in loving man? 


“Age brought him no despairing 
Of the world’s future faring; 
In human nature still 
He found more good than ill. 


“To all who dumbly suffered, 
His tongue and pen he offered; 
His life was not his own, 

Nor lived for self alone. 


“Hater of din and riot 
He lived in days unquiet; 
And, lover of all beauty, 
Trod the hard ways of duty. 


American Poetry 6g 


“He meant no wrong to any, 
He sought the good of many, 
Yet knew both sin and folly,— 
May God forgive him wholly!” 


Whittier’s Proem in the first collection of his 
poems* very modestly indicates the character 
of his poetry. He has saturated himself with 
the English poetry of the sixteenth, seventeenth, 
and eighteenth centuries; yet he feels that the 
melody of a Milton, the spirit of a Marvel, 
the deeply penetrative feeling for nature of a 
Cowper or a Wordsworth, the psychology of a 
Shakespeare, are unattainable by him. But he 
has a heart for the suffering of humanity, a 
vivid sense for liberty and justice: that will be 
found in his verses. 

And in reality he promises rather too little 
than too much. His songs of freedom and 
brotherhood have an Isaiah-like ring, as have 
those of Swinburne; only the American shares 
with the Old Testament prophet his immovable 
faith in God. 

Whittier has command of the entire vocabu- 
lary of English literature from Shakespeare to 
Tennyson, but he prefers to use only the noblest 
expressions; just as he closes his eyes to what 


*Stedman, p. 128. 


70 American Literature 


is mean, in spite of being endowed with the 
keenest observation. He knows all sides of 
human nature, but prefers to glorify the brighter 
ones. His poem, Prophetess,* shows him as 
a student and delineator of human nature of 
unusual insight. 

The ballad is almost a characteristic of Whit- 
tier and Longfellow—only Longfellow takes 
his matter preferably from a distance in time and 
space, while Whittier, on the contrary, draws 
fom his immediate surroundings, as in Maud 
Muller or Parson Avery. 

Whittier in his Songs of Labor, which do not 
confine themselves to the glorification of labor 
in general—as do, for example, the poems of 
the English Socialists, Mackay and William 
Morrist—but sing of the honorable work of the 
cobbler —with all the prosaic details of footwear: 
heel, sole, upper{—sails close to the common- 
place; that he happily escapes that danger he 
owes to his high native qualities and, above all, 
to his lofty pathos impregnated with the teach- 
ings of the Bible. 


*Stedman, p. 138. 

+Leon Kellner, “ Die Englische Literatur im Zeitalter der Koni- 
gin Viktoria,” pp. 1§9 and 525. 

tease, p, 2735 


American Poetry 71 


Whittier’s Centennial Hymn* with its re- 
sounding organ-tone— 


Our father’s God! from out whose hand 
The centuries fall like grains of sand— 


may have floated before Kipling’s mind when, 
in 1897, after the noise of the Jubilee, he com- 
posed his famous Recessional. 


6. MINOR POETS 


The clergyman John Pierpont (1785-1866) 
is still remembered on account of his songs 
against slavery. The Fugitive Slave’s Apos- 
trophe to the North Start rivals the masterpieces 
of the entire class, the slave-songs of Bryant, 
Whittier, and Longfellow. 

Puritanical—that is, not appealing to the 
~ senses—restrained, but full of temperament, are 
certain poems of Emily Judson (1817-1854)— 
known through her volume of prose sketches, 
Alderbrook—who, as the wife of the missionary, 
Adoniram Judson, spent a number of years in 
Bengal. There, at the sick-bed of her husband, 


she wrote the splendid poem, her own experi- 





*Stedman, p. 140. 
Stedman, p. 128. 


ie American Literature 


ence, Watching, which will outlive her fame as a 
narrator. 

Much good will but slight capacity was 
brought to the poet’s calling by Thomas Will- 
iam Parsons (1819-1892), the translator of 
Dante. Parsons has neither deep emotion, nor 
thought, nor melody, nor taste. The poem, 
Dirge, For One Who Fell in Battle, 1s character- 
istic of his commonplace style: 


Room for a soldier! lay him in the clover; 

He loved the fields, and they shall be his cover; 

Make his mound with her who called him once her 
lover: 

Where the rain may rain upon it, 

Where the sun may shine upon it, 

Where the lamb hath lain upon it, 

And the bee will dine upon it. 


Far higher in the scale stands Jones Very 
(1813-1880). He has a spark of the spirit of 
Transcendentalism, strone runcanc faci. 
even if not in the old Puritanic God—and not a 
little sense for rhythm, which Parsons lacked. 
His German translator, Albert Ritter, accords 
him exaggerated appreciation (/ones Very, der 
Dichter des Christentums, Linz, 1903). 

William Wetmore Story (1819-1895), who at 


American Poetry | ra 


first pursued law, not without success, then 
abangoned it, and as a sculptor attained a 
prominent place, chose by preference, as poet, 
antique subjects, such as Praxiteles and Phryne 
and Cleopatra, but never achieved with those 
more than a feeble rhetoricism. Only where 
the Puritan blood asserts itself does he find 
the strong word for the strong feeling. The 
poem, Jo Victis, a hymn to those who have fallen 
by the wayside, deserves a place among the best 
verses of American literature. 

Julia Ward Howe, who would otherwise be 
classed among the minor poets, had the one 
great inspiration of her life when, concentrating 
all the force of emotion, she wrote the Battle 
Hymn of the Republic. Nothing stronger has 
flowed from the pen of Whittier himself. 

Nowhere else, perhaps, do we find so many 
-_ versifiers who have not received “‘the call”’ as in 
the more modern American literature. Frank- 
lin, Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne knew their 
limitations, and were careful not to exceed them. 
Not so in the second half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. Almost every writer of that period es- 
sayed poetic flights. This arouses the suspicion 
in advance that the Americans of that period 
have not a very exalted conception of the nature 


74 American Literature 


of poetry. The prolific Richard Henry Stod- 
dard (1825-1903), whom the American critic 
Stedman pronounced the most eminent of 
living American poets, is a typical example of 
those rhymers who with playful ease translate 
every occasion, every event, into verse, who are 
endowed with everything—except spimt and 
genius. ‘Two thirds of those classed in America 
as poets belong to this category. 

Bayard Taylor (1825-1878) was regarded in 
his lifetime as a great poet, and not in his own 
country alone; to-day he is as good as forgotten. 
This discordance between the judgment of his 
contemporaries and that of posterity finds 
adequate explanation in Taylor’s personality. 
He was a marvel of temperament and intellectual 
elasticity: in his versatility, restlessness, and 
spirit of enterprise, a perfect type of the Yankee. 
Born on a Pennsylvania farm, and reared to 
become a farmer, he found means, as a youth 
of sixteen, to leave his native village and, after 
all sorts of intermediate ventures, to start on a 
rambling tour through Europe (1844), busily 
writing as he travelled. He learned to know 
England, stayed for a time in Germany, where 
he mastered the German language, made an 
excursion to Italy, and wrote—wrote continu- 


American Poetry 75 


ally. His travel-sketches found favor; hence 
he published them in book form: “‘ Views Afoot; 
or Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff.” Six 
editions of the book appeared in a single year. 
This success secured him recognition by the 
Tribune, a New York journal of high repute, 
which he fully justified. When the newly dis- 
covered gold fields aroused the attention of the 
world, Taylor was sent there by this paper, and 
the result was a volume of widely read descrip- 
tions, ““E] Dorado” (1850). The same year he 
journeyed to the Orient to distract his mind 
from thoughts of his wife, torn from him by 
death; and with the little volume, “Poems of 
the Orient,” he became the Bodenstedt of 
America. 

Then he was again drawn to the West. In 
Germany he made the acquaintance of Marie 
~ Hansen, daughter of the astronomer, and mar- 
ried her. He devoted himself now with the 
greatest earnestness to novel writing and met 
with success here as he had in other literary 
fields. ‘‘ Hannah Thurston” (1863), “‘ John God- 
frey’s Fortunes” (1864), ‘The Story of Kennett” 
(1866), are brilliantly written, but otherwise fall 
below the average of American narrative art. 
Taylor’s most ambitious work is “‘The Picture 


76 American Literature 


of St. John’ (1867), an autobiographic poem 
which elicited great admiration. About 1870 
his health began to fail; pecuniary cares were 
an added burden. The evening of a life so rich 
in fruitful labor passed gloomily in every sense. 
His appointment as Minister to Germany 
(1878) seemed to open a brighter prospect; but 
he was overtaken by death. 

To-day, three or four decades after his death, 
his verses sound forced, borrowed, and common- 
place. One work alone keeps his name fresh 
—-the translation of Faust; the best, according 
to many competent judges, in the English lan- 
guage. 

From the choirs of the last decades a number 
of women’s voices strike the ear with force and 
charm: Emily Dickinson, Ellen Louise Chandler 
(-Moulton), Louise Imogen Guiney, Josephine 


Preston Peabody (-Marks).* 


7) ThE, POEIRY OF 2G SOUTH 


It is an observation often made by people ac- 
quainted with the country, that the Southern 
section of the United States is not one iota less 


*The singling out of these names does not mean to signify the 
exclusion of others; it is but too easy to miss hearing even eminent 
singers. 


American Poetry re | 


godly and strong in faith than the North, only 
not so Spartan in temper. The slaveholders 
who in 1861 took up arms in the Civil War were 
no less deeply convinced of the justice of their 
cause than the Puritans of the North. This 
confidence in the good cause finds most poignant 
expression in the poetry of the South, notably in 
Henry Timrod (1829-1867), who, by at least 
one poem, 7he Cotton Boll, establishes his rank 
as peer of the great ones of the North. 

But while the poetry of the North, animated 
by a youthful consciousness of strength, looks 
jubilantly forward, in robust health and perfect 
confidence, toward certain victory all along the 
line, the creations of the South betray almost 
universally a sickly foreboding of death. It 
is perhaps not without significance that the 
_ greatest singers of the Southern States died 
young—Henry Timrod lived to the age of 
thirty-eight, Sidney Lanier thirty-nine, Edgar 
Allen Poe forty, Paul Hamilton Hayne, who at- 
tained the highest age among them, lived to be 
hifty-six. 

Aside from Poe, who in reality belongs to no 
country and cannot, therefore, be claimed by 
the Southern States as their own, none of 
those mentioned has a_ strong, individual 


78 American Literature 


nature; they merely call up great models to our 
minds. 

With special pride the South accounts Sidney 
Lanier (1842-1881), who was a native of Georgia 
and fought for the Lost Cause, its greatest poet. 
For a foreigner, Lanier is a lovably touching 
figure, something like Chenier, but hardly a 
strong creative individuality. He was descended 
from an old musical family which plumed 
itself upon having found recognition already at 
the court of Queen Elizabeth. Sidney himself 
was a master of the flute, which accompanied 
him in all the paths of his life; he clung to it even 
in war. Extremely poor, and bearing the seeds 
of death from the fields of battle, he devoted 
himself to English philology with such success 
that he obtained an appointment, poorly paid, 
at the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore, 
a position which he held until his early death. 

Lanier was one of those poetical natures that 
harbor a project for years and decades without 
giving it expression. Of such plans for more 
elaborate creations we have beautiful fragments, 
as, for example, for the epic The Jacquerie, 
which has for its theme the insurrection of the 
French peasantry in the fourteenth century. 
The statement that Lanier did not complete 


American Poetry 79 


the work on account of illness and poverty can 
hardly be accepted as conclusive; his poetic 
endowment was not equal to such an ambi- 
tiously planned production, for his was a lyric- 
didactic nature, prone to description. Critics 
have long since established his spiritual kinship 
with Bryant. In reality his fame rests upon 
three poems of an essentially contemplative and 
descriptive character: Corn, The Symphony, The 
Marshes of Glynn. Lanier is, however, more 
modern than Bryant; full of social-revolution- 
ary thoughts, in opposition to the Moloch capi- 
talism, a disciple of Carlyle and Ruskin, a 
follower of Emerson and Whitman in his feel- 
ing of being one with all nature. 


ChAT PER EY 
THE SUBJECTIVE WRITERS 
A. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 


1. CHARACTER OF TRANSCENDENTALISM.—It 1s 
customary to designate as |ranscendentalists 
a group of authors who met in Concord, a small 
town near Boston, in the years 1835 to 1845, 
and who for a time possessed an organ of their 
own, The Dial, for the spread of their ideas. 
The following are regarded as the most eminent 
of that company: William Ellery Channing 
(1780-1842), Amos Bronson Alcott (1799- 
1888),* Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), 
Theodore Parker (1810-1860), Margaret Fuller 
(1810-1850), Jones Very (1813-1880), and 
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). As 1s 1n- 
variably the case in such groups, drawn to- 
gether by chance, there are in this company 

*Outside of America the father is not known at all, while his 
daughter, Louisa May Alcott, on the contrary, enjoys a wide repu- 
tation. The stories, “Little Women” (1868-69), “Little Men” 


(1871), “Joe’s Boys” (1886), are ardently admired by German 
girls conversant with English. 


80 


The Subjective Writers SI 


persons who, connected by little more than a 
casual acquaintance, suddenly find themselves 
in the same boat, at least as viewed from the 
standpoint of literary history. Wordsworth 
had little inner relationship with Southey, and 
yet both have been handed down to posterity 
under the term ‘“‘Lake Poets”; Emerson is miles 
removed from Alcott and Chance and yet 
aes are classed together as “‘ Transcendental- 
ists.” 

On the other hand, many who by virtue of 
their spiritual kinship belong to that circle are 
never mentioned in that connection, such as 
Herman Melville, the author of the sea tale, 
“Moby Dick,” and Walt Whitman, with whom 
literary history has thus far hardly known how 
to deal. At all events, an admiration of Ger- 
man philosophy, such as had dominated the 
choicest spirits since the appearance of Kant’s 
“Critique of Pure Reason,” was common to the 
whole group. 

As early as 1829 Carlyle concluded a diatribe 
against the materialism of his day with the 
prophecy that metaphysics, contemned at the 
time, would come into its own again; and Emer- 
son, in a lecture delivered at Cambridge (Mas- 
sachusetts) in 1837, expressed the confident hope 


82 American Literature 


that America would soon supply the world with 
something besides grain and machinery. ‘These 
prophecies were fulfilled in the Transcendental- 
ists. They raised metaphysical study in Amer- 
ica to a position of honor, and that with such 
success that the aphorisms of Emerson, the 
foremost Transcendentalist, are to-day cur- 
rent in German translations, while the great 
Transcendental systems of the Fichtes, Schel- 
lings, and Hegels, to whom Emerson 1s indebted 
for his fundamental views, slumber in the dust 
of the libraries, disregarded by the great public. 

2. Emerson was, perhaps, the only one in the 
entire group who had a clear conception of what 
constituted the Transcendental creed: 

‘‘What is popularly called Transcendentalism 
among us is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 
1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided 
into two sects, Materialists and Idealists, the 
first class founding on experience, the second on 
consciousness; the first class beginning to think 
from the data of the senses, the second class 
perceive that the senses are not final, and say 
the senses give us representations of things, but 
what are the things themselves they cannot tell. 
The materialist insists on facts, on history, on 
the force of circumstances and the animal wants 


The Subjective Writers 83 


of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and 
Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual 
culture. 

“Tn the order of thought, the materialist 
takes his departure from the external world, and 
esteems a man as one product of that. The 
idealist takes his departure from his conscious- 
ness, and reckons the world an appearance.’’* 

This idealistic view of life was inculcated by 
Emerson in hundreds of aphorisms. 

Disciples of Emerson will protest against 
speaking of ‘‘aphorisms”’ of the master; they will 
ask where Emerson ever published such frag- 
ments. True, indeed, the excellent collected 
edition of Emerson’s workst contains nothing 
under such a head; but we must not be led astray 
by names and superscriptions. All of Emerson’s 
essays, addresses, and lectures are essentially, 
and by their origin, aphorisms. “Here I sit and 
read and write, with very little system and, as 
far as regards composition, with the most frag- 
mentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each 


*Centenary Edition, “Nature. Addresses and Lectures,” 
p34 ©. 

+“ Emerson’s Collected Works,” 6 vols. With introduction 
by John Morley. Macmillan & Co., London. More complete is 
the Century edition in 12 vols., with portraits and copious notes 


by Edward Waldo Emerson. Houghton Mifflin Co. 


84 American Literature 


sentence an infinitely repellent particle.” (Let- 
ter to Carlyle in the year 1838.) This is not 
by any means intended as a disparagement but 
as a characterization. Emerson’s style is the 
harmonious expression of that thinker. The 
fragmentary, the instantaneous, the tempera- 
mental, in his writings should, therefore, be 
emphasized at the very outset. 

Emerson’s life may be told in few words. 
Krom both sides he had Puritan blood in his 
veins. The family on his father’s side emigrated 
to America in the seventeenth century, and an 
ancestress, Rebekka Waldo, had fled to Boston, 
with other Waldensian families, from the blood- 
iest persecutors. Emerson lost his father at a 
very early age, and was educated by a quiet, 
musical, capable mother and a Calvinistically 
austere aunt. Following the family tradition, 
he became a minister and practised that calling 
for a number of years in a Boston Unitarian 
congregation. But even the simple ritual of 
the Unitarians grew in time intolerable to 
Emerson, he having, indeed, it appears, cut 
loose at an early date from all dogma and tradi- 
tion. He resigned his charge, and from 1832 
he lived on a little estate in Concord, upon a 
small fortune and the proceeds of his lectures. 


The Subjective Writers 85 


In 1833 he made a trip to Europe in quest of 
relaxation and to recruit his strength; while 
there, he made the acquaintance of literary 
celebrities, and sought out a man who was as 
yet far from being famous, Thomas Carlyle. 
Vehement of speech, this son of a mason 
groaned in his Scotch village isolation, tor- 
mented by petty cares, racked by impotent 
rage against a blind and deaf world so persist- 
ently insensible to his worth. Emerson, who 
shared Carlyle’s idealist outlook upon life and 
his opposition to the ever-growing power of in- 
dustrialism, did not shun the long journey; and 
his visit proved extremely welcome to Carlyle 
and his wife in their disconsolate state. On 
Emerson’s second sojourn in England, the 
distinctive characteristics of the two men came 
out in sharp relief in their intercourse, and 
their friendship suffered a temporary cloud- 
ing. Carlyle, who as a son of the people es- 
poused the Chartist cause heart and soul, even 
if, naturally, he did not dream of actually 
joining the promiscuous company that promoted 
a good cause with such evil means, could not 
comprehend Emerson’s equable spirit in face of 
the social misery; and he doubtless expressed 
with far greater harshness in personal inter- 


86 American Literature 


course the reproach which he addressed to Emer- 
son in his letters with literary restraint—namely, 
his remoteness and indifference to earthly con- 
cerns. Carlyle had already written in 1844: 
“For the rest, I have to object still (what you 
will call objecting against the Law of Nature) 
that we find you a speaker indeed, but as it were 
a Soliloquizer on the eternal mountain-tops only, 
in vast solitudes where men and their affairs lie 
all hushed in a very dim remoteness; and only 
the man and the stars and the earth are visible— 
whom, so fine a fellow seems he, we could per- 
petually punch into, and say, “Why won’t you 
come and help us then? We have terrible need 
of one man like you down among us! It 1s cold 
and vacant up there; nothing paintable but 
rainbows and emotions; come down and you 
shall do life-pictures, passions, facts. BOs 
Carlyle knew perfectly well that the attempt 
to influence a writer’s works by remonstrances 
is a hopeless task, and he did not indulge in 1- 
lusions as regards Emerson, either; but the chasm 
was there, and nothing could bridge it over. The 
year 1847, the date of Emerson’s second sojourn 
in London, marks, therefore, a sort of crisis in 


*Charles Eliot Norton, ‘The Correspondence of T. Carlyle and 
R. W. Emerson,’ II, p. 81. 


The Subjective Writers 87 


the relations of the two men. The estrange- 
ment abated, however, when the sea rolled be- 
tween them; the correspondence was resumed, 
and discontinued only on the threshold of old 
age. 

Emerson made still a third visit to Europe, in 
the year 1872, and this time he had difficulty 
in warding off the homage of enthusiastic dis- 
ciples. These journeys are the only events in 
the quiet life of the thinker. Calmly and evenly 
his days flowed on with his family, among his 
books and trees. His mother and his wife stood 
lovingly between him and the restless world; his 
son, Edward Waldo, grew to be a fine physician.* 
The innate gentleness of his nature increased 
with advancing age from year to year; toward 
the close of his life he lost all memory for every- 
day concerns, and lived only in the world of the 
past and of imperishable interests. 

For the uninitiated who wish to become ac- 
quainted with Emerson, it would be advisable 
to leave the poems, essays, and lectures aside 
and begin with an apparently very little known 
and greatly underrated work, “English Traits’’ 
(Vol. 4 of John Morley’s edition). It would 


*It is to this son we are indebted for the publication of Emer- 
son’s “Journals” (1820 to 1855),in 8 vols. Houghton Mifflin Co. 


88 American Literature 


be difficult to find a book from which one can 
gather such varied, profound, definitive infor- 
mation concerning England and the English as 
is given in these sketches, and one may safely 
venture the heresy that in none of his writings 
does Emerson appear so simple, so natural, so 
lovable and clear-sighted. All the excellences 
of Emerson the thinker and writer shine forth in 
this little work; the defects which mar his other 
writings are almost completely absent. It 
shows us the man in the zenith of his creative 
power. The gift of poetic vision, the exquisite 
similes, the divining of the profoundest rela- 
tions, the wealth of eloquence——all that capti- 
vates us in Emerson is found here; what 1s 
lacking is only what we should gladly dispense 
with elsewhere—the tone of the prophet, the 
air of importance which presents a banality 
as a revelation, the elaboration and repetition, 
the arbitrariness. 

How greatly the “English Traits” differs in 
style from the other works of Emerson 1s best 
shown by those chapters which touch most 
closely the subjects treated in the Essays; as, 
for example, the sections relating to religion and 
literature. To quote only a saying here and 
there: 


The Subjective Writers 89 


“Tt is with religion [of the England of to-day] 
as with marriage. A youth marries in haste; 
afterward, when his mind 1s opened to the reason 
of the conduct of life, he 1s asked what he thinks 
of the institution of marriage and of the nght 
relations of the sexes. ‘I should have much to 
say, he might reply, ‘if the question were open, 
but I have a wife and children, and all question 
is closed for me.’ In the barbarous days of a 
nation, some cultus is formed or imported; altars 
are built, tithes are paid, priests ordained. ‘The 
education and expenditure of the country take 
that direction, and when wealth, refinement, 
great men, and ties to the world supervene, its 
prudent men say, Why fight against Fate, or 
lift these absurdities which are now mountain- 
ous? Better find some niche or crevice in this 
mountain of stone which religious ages have 
quarried and carved, wherein to bestow your- 
self, than attempt anything ridiculously and 
dangerously above your strength, like removing 
hey 

“In York minster, on the day of the enthron- 
ization of the new archbishop, I heard the 
service of evening prayer read and chanted in 
the choir. It was strange to hear the pretty 
pastoral of the betrothal of Rebecca and Isaac, 


go American Literature 


in the morning of the world, read with circum- 
stantiality in York Minster, on the 13th January, 
1848, to the decorous English audience, just 
fresh from the Times newspaper and their wine 
and listening with all the devotion of national 
pride. . . . Here in England every day 
a chapter of Genesis, and a leader in the 
Times.” 

“Their religion is a quotation; their church 
is a doll; and any examination 1s interdicted with 
screams of terror. In good company you expect 
them to laugh at the fanaticism of the vulgar, 
but they do not; they are the vulgar.” 

“The later English want the faculty of Plato 
and Aristotle, of grouping men in natural classes 
by an insight of general laws, so deep that the 
rule is deduced with equal precision from few 
subjects, or from one, as from multitudes of 
lives. Shakespeare is supreme in that, as in all 
the great mental energies. The Germans gen- 
eralize: the English cannot interpret the German 
mind. German science comprehends the Eng- 
lish. The absence of the faculty in England 1s 
shown by the timidity which accumulates moun- 
tains of facts, as a bad general wants myriads of 
men and miles of redoubts to compensate the 
inspirations of courage and conduct.” 


The Subjective Writers gI 


The last remark might have been taken from 
one of the Essays, so strongly marked is the 
metaphysical bias, sooverconfidently does Emer- 
son here make use of the standard which he 
obtains, after all, only from a much-disputed 
philosophical tenet. One could hardly blame a 
chorizont if he expressed the opinion that it 1s 
impossible for the “‘English Traits” to have been 
written by the author of the Essays; and the 
strongest support of his hypothesis would be the 
circumstance that the ‘‘English Traits,’ with 
all its depth, all its earnestness, manifests a 
delicious humor which is totally lacking in 
Emerson’s other productions. 

After the beginner has studied “English 
Traits,’ he may venture upon the essay, Poetry 
and Imagination, which forms the transition, as 
it were, from the lucid to the obscure, from the 
seeing to the dreaming, from the descriptive to the 
phantom-pursuing Emerson; from coherent, sys- 
tematic trains of thought to a desultory succes- 
sion of stray reflections. But take care! The 
reader must not lose patience on the first page, 
else he will commit the error of regarding as 
superficiality what is really a pardonable aban- 
don, which on closer acquaintance is found to be 
charming and inspires our confidence. ‘This 


92 American Literature 


essay is perhaps the only connected and inten- 
tionally elementary presentation of the idealist 
view of life which permeates all the currents of 
Emerson’s thoughts; and it has, beyond this, the 
ereat advantage that it brings out sharply and 
clearly what one is elsewhere required to infer 
from oracular sayings. 

Emerson is a metaphysician, to be sure, as 
was Plato; but his monism is at bottom the 
evolution theory. On the threshold of the 
essay Poetry and Imagination, we are met 
by such trusty guides as St. Hilaire, Oken, 
Goethe, Agassiz, Owen, and Darwin (Vol. VI, 
p. 4). The whole universe, from the downnght- 
perceptible to the supersensual-incomprehen- 
sible, is one, but 1s pursuing a constant course 
of upward development: the metamorphosis of 
the plant is an image of the world in miniature. 
One animal, one plant, one substance, one force; 
the laws of light and heat explain each other; 
likewise, the laws of color and sound; just as 
galvanism, electricity, and magnetism are only 
different manifestations of the same force. 

Thus far we follow Emerson readily, even if 
somewhat impatiently; we have, indeed, heard 
all that before. But this is only the elementary 
presumption, the little multiplication table from 


The Subjective Writers 93 


which the mathematician develops the Abelian 
functions. The entire visible universe, hill and 
dale, stream and wood, the seasons, iron, stone, 
steam—everything is a symbol of the spiritual 
world; all natural laws are but parallels to what 
obtains in the moral world. The Philistine, 
the rationalist, the narrow-minded materialist, 
sees only the symbol; Plato and Swedenborg 
saw the real universe behind the symbol. It 
is from this standpoint that Emerson interprets 
everything that enters into the world of 
phenomena—creation and extinction, history 
and politics, genius and politics, genius and 
talent, intellect and heart, heroism, character, 
love, friendship, wisdom and folly, art and liter- 
ature. 

It may readily be imagined how difficult it 
must have been for Emerson to bring his inter- 
pretation of the riddle of the universe into har- 
mony with all these observations upon life. 
Fortunately, he never even attempted to build 
up asystem. AsI remarked at the outset: each 
essay is really a pearl-strand of aphorisms, the 
discovery of whose connection Emerson leaves, 
in the main, to the acuteness of the reader. We 
constantly come across the most beautiful and 
most profound utterances where we least ex- 


94 American Literature 


pect them. It is, of course, not impossible to 
arrange these fragmentary thoughts in an or- 
derly way under certain heads, nor would it be 
a task without merit to collect luminous rays, 
as it were, from Emerson’s works, for German 
readers, as has long since been done by Amert- 
cans; but is this in accord with the author’s 
spirit? He would presumably have decidedly 
opposed such a falsification. “Lf am myself!” 
would probably have been his polite but irrev- 
ocable answer. 


B. THE PRIMITIVES 
1. THE STARTING-POINT OF THE PRIMITIVES 


This brings us to what is most profound, 
most characteristic, most fruitful in Emerson’s 
nature and influence, to that way of viewing 
things which connects him with the subjectives, 
with Thoreau and Whitman. 

The right to one’s own individuality was first 
insisted upon with distinct positiveness and em- 
phasis by Emerson, among all the revolutionary 
thinkers of the world. Thoreau and Whitman 
carried the doctrine into action, into practical 
life. ‘‘Wherever a man comes,” says Emerson 
in his famous Divinity School Address, “there 
comes revolution. Theoldisforslaves. . . 


The Subjective Writers 95 


Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to 
refuse the good models, even those which are 
sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to 
love God without mediator or veil.’ And in 
another place: ‘‘We have been born out of the 
eternal silence; and now will we live—live for 
ourselves—and not as the pall-bearers of a 
funeral, but as the upholders and creators of our 
age; and neither Greece nor Rome, nor the three 
Unities of Aristotle, nor the three kings of 
Cologne, nor the College of the Sorbonne, nor 
the Edinburgh Review is to command any 
longer. Now that we are here we will put our 
own interpretation on things, and own things for 
interpretation. Please himself with complai- 
sance who will—for me, things must take my 
scale, not I theirs.” 

This Emersonian doctrine of self-dependence, 
this exhortation to begin life anew, to be one’s 
own ancestor, Thoreau and Whitman followed 
to its extreme conclusions. 

2. THOREAU.—Henry Thoreau was the grand- 
son of a Frenchman who emigrated to Massa- 
chusetts from the island of Jersey in the 
eighteenth century and married a Scotch- 
woman. Henry’s father, who was a lead-pencil 
manufacturer in Concord, had a struggle to 


96 American Literature 


make a living for his family, but he was con- 
tented with himself and the world, lovable, 
obliging, a good, honest fellow. Henry grew 
up like all the poor youth in the villages and 
small towns of New England: living a great deal 
in the fine, open air, granted little in the way of 
indulgences. He drove his father’s cattle to 
pasture barefoot when a child of six, studied the 
catechism, reading, and writing in the elementary 
school. Like all talented New England lads, he, 
too, longed to enter a university; he went to 
Harvard and learned enough to obtain an 
academic degree and become a teacher in his 
native place. But he did not please his fellow- 
citizens, ostensibly because he did not whip the 
children. henceforth he was, in reality, with- 
out a calling; he attempted a versification of 
Prometheus, translated various things from 
Pindar, was something of a surveyor, then was 
for two years a guest in Emerson’s house, where 
he made himself useful in every way. In his 
twenty-eighth year he suddenly withdrew from 
thecircleof poets and thinkers that had gathered 
around Emerson into the isolation of Walden 
Pond. He began to build his log hut in the 
early spring of 1845—enduring his solitary 
existence there until September, 1847. How 


The Subjective Writers 97 


did he live and on what? He has himself told 
us in his unique work, ‘‘ Walden.’”* 

He rose early and took a bath in the pond; 
then he tilled his bit of ground, where he raised 
potatoes, beans, and beets. Before and after 
noon he generally took a walk of several hours. 
“T think I cannot preserve my health and 
spirits,” he remarks in the essay on walking, t 
‘unless I spend four hours a day at least 
sauntering through the woods and fields, ab- 
solutely free from all engagements.” 

As the produce of his acres did not sustain 
him, he fished in the pond and worked occasion- 
ally as surveyor, carpenter, and day laborer in 
his immediate vicinity. And he felt, as he 
Says, as happy as the first creature in Paradise. 
Nevertheless, he returned after the lapse of two 
and a half years to the much-reviled civilization 
of the town, worked again as gardener in Emer- 
son’s household, then as a pencil-maker. Before 
he had reached his fortieth year it became evi- 
dent that his lungswere affected. He had always 
had the seeds of pulmonary consumption, and 
his distaste for indoor confinement and urban 
occupation may, in the last analysis, be due to 


*Thoreau, “Walden,” London, W. Scott, p. 995 cb seg. 
t“Thoreau’s Essays,” London, W. Scott, p. 3. 


98 American Literature 


that cause. In his forty-eighth year his powers 
of resistance against the deadly disease were 
exhausted. He was buried on the shores of 
Walden Pond; a pyramid of pebbles, steadily 
increasing in height, is his tombstone. 

Thoreau’s flight from the world is entirely 
of a mundane nature and bears little relation 
to his Transcendental views. He, too, often 
speaks of the soul as the essential thing as com- 
pared to that accident, our body; but what de- 
termined him to forsake the overcrowded abodes 
of his fellowmen was not the craving for undis- 
turbed spiritual culture, but the atavistic long- 
ing for an untrammelled life, for breathing-space 
and freedom, for color and fragrance. ‘Thoreau, 
the author, labors under a double burden, an 
inherited and a voluntarily assumed one. The 
Puritan tradition of didacticism, which was in- 
herent in every native of New England, was 
ereatly strengthened in him by his admiration 
of the example set by Carlyle. Every experi- 
ence is made an occasion for more or less ex- 
tended instruction; the consciousness of having 
a teacher’s mission on earth does not leave him 
for an instant. This didacticism spoils the 
book, “Walden,” upon which Thoreau’s fame 
really rests. 


The Subjective Writers 99 


Thoreau is known to German readers ex- 
clusively as a prose writer, and probably even 
American readers rarely come across his poems. 
And yet he has left us verses of the greatest 
solemnity and the finest polish, as, for example, 
the few stanzas, full of thought, in Inspiration. 
The following lines from that poem have re- 
mained indelibly fixed in my mind: 


I hearing get, who had but ears, 

And sight, who had but eyes before; 

I moments live, who lived but years, 

And truth discern, who knew but learning’s lore. 


3. WHITMAN.—Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt 
Whitman, who by virtue of their entire endow- 
ment, their life, and their mission as writers 
belong together, should not be separated in the 
history of literature. 

All three are nonconformists, not only in re- 
lation to the ruling church, but in relation to 
the ruling customs. 

Every respectable person in New England has 
a definite calling, even if he does not need it for 
his maintenance; Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt 
Whitman never allowed themselves to be placed 
under the yoke of any of the usual occupations, 
in spite of needing it for their maintenance. 


100 American Literature 


In close social contact custom compels even 
the most callous to observe a certain measure of 
regard for the prejudices and feelings of their 
fellowmen. Our three nonconformists, though 
they had the most delicate appreciation of the 
spiritual life of others, offended against conven- 
tional sensibilities without the slightest com- 
punction. It was Walt Whitman, in particular, 
who, with the freedom of primitive man, re- 
jected every sort of fig leaf and impressed the 
whole world, consequently, as shameless. And 
as in their daily life, so in their thought, speech, 
writing. They ignored the traditional laws of 
composition, paid no heed to prescribed forms, 
to the versification and diction of their prede- 
cessors, but sought, as did aforetime Herder 
and the other storm-and-stress writers, a new 
vessel for the new wine. 

Of the three primitives Walt Whitman car- 
ried this revolt against tradition the furthest; 
he has, therefore, been exposed to the greatest 
misunderstandings. 

Like Thoreau, Whittier, and so many other of 
the great spiritual lights of America, Walt 
Whitman was a descendant of farmers and 
small tradespeople. His paternal ancestors 
emigrated to America from England in the 


The Subjective Writers) “IOI 


seventeenth century; those on his mother’s side 
came from Holland. Walt was born in the 
year 1819 at West Hills, Long Island; from 1824 
the Whitmans resided in Brooklyn, where the 
father practised his trade as carpenter. Walt 
attended the elementary public schools, but it 
devolved upon him at an early age to contribute 
to the support of the family—frst as an errand 
boy in a lawyer’s ofhice, then in that of a physi- 
cian. In order to escape from this menial posi- 
tion, he learned typesetting and tried work as 
a printer. He did not endure this labor long, 
for he was irresistibly impelled to wander afield 
in the open air. Thus he became a country 
school teacher and roamed from village to vil- 
lage. In every New Englander, a good judge 
of America once remarked, there is the making 
of a more or less talented journalist. Walt 
Whitman, too, soon found his way to the news- 
paper. At the age of twenty he founded, in his 
home town on Long Island, a_ short-lived 
weekly; he returned to New York the following 
year and maintained himself as printer and 
journalist. The life and stir of the metropolis 
appealed to him; he was a frequent visitor of 
the theatre, particularly the opera, and was a 
passionate admirer of Booth, whom he saw in 


102 American Literature 


all his Shakespearian impersonations. He made 
the acquaintance, at the same time, of Poe and 
Cooper. In 1842 he published the problem 
novel, “Franklin Evans, the Inebriate.” In 
1846 and 1847 he edited the Brooklyn Eagle, 
but once more the roving passion seized him 
and drove him from the town. In the com- 
pany of his brother, a congenial spirit, he wan- 
dered southward and reached New Orleans on 
foot. There he made his living as collaborator 
on a local paper, and remained as long as the 
novel life of the South had something to impart 
to him. After he had seen, or believed he had 
seen, everything of consequence, he returned to 
New York. He had by now had enough of 
newspaper writing, and suddenly discovered 
in himself an interest in practical life. He 
entered, accordingly, into the business of his 
father, who, from a modest carpenter, had be- 
come a big building contractor. Here Walt 
held out for several years. Then he realized 
that one earned too much money in that busi- 
ness, and withdrew from it affrighted. As if in 
expiation, he devoted himself entirely to the 
elaboration of his first poems. 

In 1855 the little book “‘ Leaves of Grass”’ first 
saw the light of day—a veritable event in Amer- 


The Subjective Writers 103 


ican literature—at first, of course, a disre- 
garded event. Very few copies of the now 
valuable work were sold. Emerson alone rec- 
ognized the merit of the poems and congrat- 
ulated Whitman on his work in a long and 
enthusiastic letter. 

In 1862 Walt’s brother, George, was wounded 
in the battle of Fredericksburg. He hastened 
to his side and remained in the hospital long 
after his recovery—the good genius of the 
wounded, whom he tended, comforted, cheered, 
with inexhaustible kindness. Whitman had, 
as we know from Thoreau, a fascinating person- 
ality, and he put it unreservedly into the service 
of the sick soldiers. He naturally contracted 
the so-called hospital fever in this Samaritan 
activity, a malady which clung to him the rest 
of his life. 

After the close of the Civil War he obtained 
a government office through the intercession of 
influential friends, but soon lost it when it was 
learned in high quarters that he had written 
the ‘indecent book,” ‘“‘Leaves of Grass.”’ 

This incident had as its consequence William 
Douglas O’Connor’s brilliant controversial trea- 
tise, The Good Gray Poet, with the practical 
result that Whitman received another position 


104 American Literature 


almost immediately, this time in the attorney- 
general’s department. This post he occupied 
until 1873, when he suffered a stroke of apo- 
plexy. But his robust nature conquered, and 
he recovered sufficiently to enable him to pub- 
lish an enlarged edition of the “ Leaves of Grass” 
and to deliver the famous address on the death 
of Lincoln. In 1882 he published a collection 
containing his youthful poems, a number of 
tales, and the address upon Lincoln’s death. 
In 1882 he suffered another apoplectic stroke, 
but his courage and his optimism were un- 
quenchable. He died in 1892—to the last 
moment undaunted in spirit, patient and 
cheerful. 

A phenomenon like that of Walt Whitman 
strikes students of literature and esthetics with 
an elemental bewilderment and shows. indis- 
putably that the old views, means, and methods 
no longer suffice, that the prevailing concep- 
tions are in need of a fundamental reéxamina- 
tion. The perplexed critic, confronting the 
unprecedented, the unknown, in any unusual 
specimen, is thrown back upon esthetics and 
literary research alone. The botanist who be- 
holds a new plant obtained from a region just 
discovered, having a peculiar soil and atmos- 


The Subjective Writers 105 


pheric conditions, is always able to determine 
without any difficulty to what species it belongs, 
wherein it resembles the known plants related 
to it, wherein it differs from them. ‘The critic 
stands helpless before a Walt Whitman. Net- 
ther the current classification nor the prevailing 
estimate can be made to fit the isolated in- 
dividual; in vain does the literary connoisseur 
cudgel his brains to discover a related species, 
an analogy. Now, the objection should not be 
raised that life is inexhaustible in its combina- 
tions and that, consequently, all systematism 
is bound to fall short. That is not true. Na- 
ture has created countless living beings with 
immeasurable gradations and transitions; but 
the biologist can classify plant and animal with- 
out excessive effort—the systematism of the 
botanist and zoologist has never yet failed al- 
together. The student of literature alone must 
start from the beginning when confronting an 
author of distinctive character, just as though 
he had not already classified thousands of ex- 
amples of asthetic endowment. 

Whitman has but one thing in common with 
the artists in words thus far known to us—that 
he thinks and speaks in words; that 1s all that 
can be asserted of him as far as classification 1s 


106 American Literature 


concerned. Is hea poet? It 1s difficult to say. 
The words are not poetical, for they are taken 
from the lips of the common man, the artisan, 
and the farmer, from the language of text- 
books and dissertations. The rhythm 1s oc- 
casionally musical, but as a rule it is not to be 
distinguished from prose.* ‘Traditional em- 
bellishments, such as rhyme and strophic di- 
vision, are lacking entirely. Even the visualizing 
of the subjects of thought, images and similes, 
is disdained by Walt Whitman. The ear- 
marks, accordingly, of what has hitherto been 
considered poetry are absent. And the sub- 
stance? The subject-matter? Yes, he has 
this in common with the poets—he sings of love 
as the beginning and end of all poetry. But 
what reader will recognize the poems which he 
calls ‘Children of Adam”’ as love songs? 


From pent-up aching rivers, 

From that of myself without which I were nothing, 

From what I am determined to make illustrious, 
even if I stand sole among men, 

From my own voice resonant, singing the phallus, 

Singing the song of procreation, 


*It has been asserted that his rhythm is essentially hexametric; 
this view is controverted by Basil de Selincourt (“Walt Whit- 
man,” London, 1914), and with justice. 


The Subjective Writers 107 


Singing the need of superb children and therein 
superb grown people, 

Singing the muscular urge and the blending, 

Singing the bedfellow’s song (O resistless yearning! 

O for any and each the body correlative attracting!). 


Another theme of poets, too, love of country, 
is to be found in Walt Whitman, but how far 
removed from ours are his conceptions of father- 
land, his feelings for one’s native soil! 


Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missoun, 
aware of mighty Niagara, 

Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the 
hirsute and strong-breasted bull, 

Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, 
stars, rain, snow, my amaze, 

Having studied the mocking-bird’s tones and the 
flight of the mountain-hawk, 

And heard at dawn the unrivall’d one, the hermit 
thrush from the swamp-cedars, 

Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New 
World. 


With firm and regular step they wend, they never 
stop, 

Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions, 

One generation playing its part and passing on, 

Another generation playing its part and passing on 
in its turn, 


108 American Literature 


With faces turn’d sideways or backward toward mc 
to listen, 
With eyes retrospective toward me. 


Americanos! conquerors! Marches humanitarian! 

Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses! 

For you a programme of chants. 

Chants of the prairies, 

Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down 
to the Mexican sea, 

Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and 
Minnesota, 

Chants going forth from the centre, from Kansas, 
and thence equidistant 

Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all. 


Walt Whitman’s strongest, most striking 
trait, the one most repellent to the Philistines, 
is his self-absorption, his egotism as the English 
term it. This psychical disposition is by no 
means to be confounded with egoism. Walt 
Whitman was the most unselfish, humane, 
noblest “egotist.”” The whole universe—not 
only in theoretical cognition—exists primarily 
through him and for him; he is, as he candidly 
confesses, the most important fact to himself, 
the most interesting cosmic phenomenon. The 
‘Leaves of Grass” is, as he declared,* his carte 


*“ Backward Glance o’er Travelled Roads.” 


The Subjective Writers 109 


de visite, and the first poem of that collection 1s, 
characteristically, the Song of Myself, the open- 
ing verse being a challenge to caricature: 


I celebrate myself, and sing myself. 


Not, however, that he regarded himself as 
something special, something extraordinary. 
On the contrary, he wants to be only the aver- 
age man, in whom the whole nation, the entire 
American democracy, nay, the entire world, 
will recognize itself; what he is, that every other 
man is as well; only he has the courage to be 
himself. He does not reckon upon being com- 
prehended by his contemporaries; his work 1s 
dedicated to future generations, when all men, 
united as comrades and loving brethren, will 
feel as he does. 

The other trait in Walt Whitman, one which 
aroused the indignation not of Puritan America 
alone but of the whole world, is his fanatical 
enthusiasm for truth, which, conscious of its 
own innocence and of the purest intentions, 
aims to call things by their right names. This 
zeal has been wrongly interpreted as immorality. 


Only thus is the nakedness of language in The 
Song of Myself and in the collection ‘ Children 


110 American Literature 


of Adam” (notably in the poems J Sing the 
Body Electric, A Woman Waits for Me, Ages 
and Ages Returning at Intervals, 1 Am He That 
Aches with Love) to be understood. 

While Walt Whitman’s self-absorption ex- 
cited ridicule, and. his alleged sensuality of- 
fended the Puritanic spirits, a third feature 
of his disposition called forth the stormy op- 
position of the world of criticism. Walt Whit- 
man has no esthetic checks, no self criticism, 
no faculty of distinguishing between poetical 
essentials and poetical side-matters, between 
what is appropriate, from the point of view of 
effect, and what runs counter to that object. 
He tells everything that passes through his 
mind, he names everything that he sees—with- 
out selection, without gradation. That is why 
his enthusiastic rhapsodies produce the impres- 
sion of an auctioneer’s catalogue, or, more cor- 
rectly, of a systematic vocabulary. 

How did Walt Whitman arrive at this sort of 
lyric emphasis, produced by enumeration and 
repetition? All his tracks lead back to the 
Psalms.* Needless to remark that in every 
Puritan household the Psalter had for hun- 
dreds of years been almost fused with everyday 


*Cf. particularly Psalms 116, 119, 136. 


The Subjective Writers III 


life, had passed into the flesh and blood of every 
individual. 

And still a fourth peculiarity explains his 1so- 
lated place in nature. He has the gift of aston- 
ishment, which no poet or thinker ever lacked, 
ina higher degree than any poet ever had be- 
fore him. While to us dull Philistines the spec- 
tacle of the sun and moon, of rain and snow, 
have become unregarded, everyday things, Walt 
Whitman sees ever again in the pettiest phenom- 
enon of nature a new miracle: 


Why, who makes much of a miracle? 

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, 

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, 

Or dart my sight over roofs of houses toward the sky, 

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just on the 
edge of the water. 

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, 

Every cubic yard of the surface of the earth is spread 
with the same, 

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same. 

To me the sea is a continual miracle, 

The fishes that swim, the rocks, the motion of the 
waves, the ships with men in them, 

What stranger miracles are there? 


Wholly unpuritanic is Walt Whitman’s op- 
timism. In perfect accord with Rousseau, he 


112 American Literature 


does not look upon the earth as a vale of tears, 
but as a paradise; he does not see the world as a 
chaos of accidents, but as a cosmos, a work of 
art, complete as a whole and in every minutest 
detail. 


From imperfection’s murkiest cloud 

Darts always forth one ray of perfect light, 
One flash of heaven’s glory. 

‘To fashion’s custom’s discord, 

To the mad Babel din, the deafening orgies, 
Soothing each hill a strain is heard, just heard, 
From some far shore the final chorus sounding. 
O the blest eyes, the happy hearts, 

That see, that know the guiding thread so fine, 
Along the mighty labyrinth. 


The pantheistic view of life Walt Whitman 
shares with Emerson and Thoreau, and he has, 
moreover, following Emerson’s example, clothed 
his presentiments in mystical language. In 
comparing Emerson’s Woodnotes, and the brief 
poem Brahma, with Whitman’s /idolons and 
other metaphysical effusions such as Of the Ter- 
rible Doubt of Appearances, Song of the Answerer, 
Rolling Earth, Mystic Trumpeter, it will be found 
that Emerson has already expressed with ters- 
est brevity, as befits an oracular utterance, all 
the thoughts that Whitman voices in long- 


The Subjective Writers Ik3 


winded rhapsodies accompanied by explanatory 
comments, as it were. 

The idea of evolution, the uninterrupted chain 
of generation and destruction and new creation, 
Whitman never tires of repeating in ever new lan- 
guage (Song of Myself, Children of Adam, etc.). 

His belief in the progress of mankind and in 
the Platonic future state rests upon the un- 
bounded capacity for development of the human 
character. This faith he has in common with 
John Stuart Mill and all utilitarians,* 

As to Walt Whitman’s diction, its most char- 
acteristic traits are repetition, the rhetorical 
question, ejaculation. His predilection for rep- 
etition exhibits itself, not only in the heaping up 
of words of allied meaning, he likes to use the 
same initial words and does not hesitate to em- 
ploy the same three or more verses in different 
parts of the same poem, as inthe Salutau Monde. 

How far he carries this mode of repetition is 
shown in such verses as 


Their Throbbings Throbbed 


Or 


I dream in a dream all the dreams of the 
other dreamers. 





*Kellner, “Die Englische Literatur im Zeitalter der Konigin 
iktoria,” p. 79, 


114 American Literature 


American admirers of Whitman like to claim 
that he is the most American of all poets, that 
he, as no other, gives expression in his poems to 
the greatness of America. One of the editors 
of the “Complete Writings,” Dr. Oscar Lovell 
Triggs, finds that “it is a picture of America in 
the nineteenth century. All America is in it. 
Nothing is lacking. We are presented, not se- 
riatim, but in a consecutive arrangement of in- 
termittent and, as it were, casual flashes, with 
the original wilderness of North America and its 
first colonization from the Old World—its abo- 
rigines, explorers, trappers, pioneers, settlers, 
farmers, planters, miners, slave and free ne- 
eroes.” And the writer gives a long list of all 
that is found in Whitman—“lakes, rivers, la- 
goons, mountains, coasts, bays, ports, cities, 
and boundaries; its deserts, swamps, its pastoral 
plains; its innumerable farms with all their prod- 
ucts—wheat, cotton, maize, rye, sugar, rice, 
cattle, wood, maple, fir, poplar, cedar, live-oak, 
cypress . . . ” And inthis catalogue and 
price-list style evidence is adduced that Whit- 
man mirrors in poetic form all of America of the 
last three hundred years. This assertion 1s, 
to put it mildly, a petitio principii, for the world 
must first give its assent to the proposition that 


The Subjective Writers 115 


two elements which it has hitherto regarded as 
essential characteristics of all poetry—namely, 
rhythm in the form, and selection in the sub- 
stance—should be thrown overboard or shoved 
into a corner as of no consequence whatever. 
The world must decide whether it prefers the 
first chance word because it sprang ready and 
unsought to the poet’s mind, or one that he em- 
ployed because in the whole range of his vocab- 
ulary no other could be used inits place. The 
world must furthermore decide whether the old 
element in the effect of a poem, the joy in sheer 
ability, shall be entirely eliminated. Only when 
this referendum shall in the course of time have 
been applied and have resulted in favor of art- 
less poetry, only then shall we be willing to bow 
to the judgment which declares Walt Whitman 
to be the poet of America. Walt Whitman’s 
influence upon modern poetry is, I believe, over- 
estimated. Reversion to the ego and to primi- 
tiveness spring, as we have seen, from Emerson. 
But what is wholly new in Whitman and 
peculiar to himself alone, his style, has found 
few imitators. In Germany, Johannes Schlaf 
and Paul Remer have exalted Walt Whit- 
man as the starting-point of a new form and 
of a new melody, but the noise of the cory- 


116 American Literature 


bants has died away; it has waked no echo 
anywhere. 


4. MELVILLE.—This group of writers had a 
most original compeer in Herman Melville, the 
author—almost unknown in Germany—of the 
sea tale ““Typee”’ (a journey to the Marquesas 
Islands), 1846; ‘““Omoo” (descriptions of the 
south Sea), 1847; ~ Mardi,’ 1848; “Were 
Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War,” 1850; 
“The White Whale, or Moby Dick,” 1851, etc. 

These tales are characterized by a realism 
which anticipates the Zolas and Goncourts, but 
surpasses them in verity, inasmuch as every par- 
ticular was seen and experienced. In “Moby 
Dick,” his most widely read work, the writer nar- 
rates in the first person how a certain Ishmael 
enlists on a whaler as a common sailor, and gives 
all his experiences until the foundering of the ves- 
sel. That Ishmael was Melville himself. What 
Kipling admired so greatly in Frank T. Bullen’s 
“Cruise of the Cachalot”’ was accomplished by 
the American nearly fifty years earlier, and 
that with a considerable measure of wordly wise 
humor. Unfortunately, Melville fell at an early 
day under the influence of Carlyle and the spirit- 
ualists; that proved very detrimental to his de- 


The Subjective Writers 117 


lineation, and particularly to his style. He rep- 
resents his hero, Captain Ahab, a whaler, as a 
mysterious fire-eating figure of colossal propor- 
tions who outdoes himself in high-sounding 
phrases and indulges in a quantity of exclama- 
tory words. And at the same time, behind pal- 
pable events of the most commonplace sort, the 
cosmic soul of things is constantly sought. 


CHAT TERY 
THE HARVARD INTELLECTUALS 


1. COMMON CHARACTERISTICS.—Of the poets 
that are brought together here under the common 
roof of Harvard University, each had a sharply 
marked individuality. One cannot detect in 
any poem of Longfellow a kinship of soul with 
Holmes, in any line of Lowell’s political satire 
an answering chord to the poesy of the singer of 
Hiawatha. And yet there is one essential trait 
that they have in common, which makes them 
recognizable in the midst of the great mass of 
contemporary poets and prose writers—aca- 
demic culture, the finest urbanity, and with all 
their Americanism a cosmopolitan breadth of 
view. The genius of Harvard College, the 
historic guardian of cultural tradition and of 
spiritual cohesion with the mother country, is 
personified in these three men who occupied, 
not in vain, chairs at the famous Alma Mater. 
These academic men of Harvard are the last 
examples of the thinkers of former days who 


Tid 








The Harvard Intellectuals 11g 


still possessed the privilege, like the philosophers 
of antiquity, of indulging to their heart’s con- 
tent in free-hand literary production outside 
their special calling and occasionally even with- 
init. Lowellwas a most conscientious and thor- 
ough student of literary history, and could 
make it very unpleasant for a dabbler, as his 
sharp attack upon incompetent editors* shows. 
But that did not prevent him from chatting, 
joking, pamphleteering, in prose and_ verse. 
Holmes was a professional man of the first or- 
der; but he was also the Autocrat of the Break- 
fast-table. To-day, these men, in order to be 
taken seriously by their colleagues, would hide 
their lighter effusions in the most secret drawers 
of their desks. 

The spiritual kinship of these men is appar- 
ent in all their works; Lowell not only reminds 
one constantly of Holmes by his extensive read- 
ing, but the two humorists are often struck by 
the same conceit, often even clothe a thought in 
a like form. 

It may appear paradoxical, and yet it is an 
absolute fact, that American literature is in- 
debted to one of these highly learned Brahmins 
for the utilization of dialect, and to another for 


*Library of Old Authors. Literary Essays, I, 262 et seg. 


120 American Literature 


the literary possibilities of table talk. All the 
literatures of Europe may envy America for 
these achievements. Lowell’s “ Biglow Papers”’ 
and the breakfast-table conceits of the “‘Auto- 
crat’’ are unique of their kind. 

2. LONGFELLOw.—Henry Wadsworth Long- 
fellow (1807-1882) was ordained by Providence 
to be the poet of optimism. A temperament 
calm despite his warmth, a clear intellect, a sus- 
ceptible, soft, loving heart, were nature’s en- 
dowments; his parents provided him with an 
unclouded youth amid the most beautiful sur- 
roundings and in a happy home circle; and his 
country granted him the possibility of devoting 
his life, free from care, to learning and poetry. 
As a very young man he was offered the position 
of professor of modern languages at Bowdoin 
College, and sent to Europe to fit himself for it. 
The nineteen-year-old scholar travels through 
France and becomes acquainted with the seduc- 
tive Lutetia without allowing himself to be cap- 
tivated too long by her charms; in Spain and 
Italy he makes a long sojourn and penetrates 
into the spirit of the Romance languages and Iit- 
eratures. He sees Vienna, too, learns German 
in Dresden and Gottingen, and finally, after a 
three years’ absence, returns home. 


The Harvard Intellectuals 121 


At the age of twenty-two he 1s actually made 
professor, with a salary of a thousand dollars; 
at twenty-four he leads a cultured and beautiful 
girl to the altar. Under the genial rays of 
domestic happiness, Longfellow’s poetic and 
scholarly activities develop rapidly. His fame 
soon penetrated beyond the limits of his home, 
and in 1835 he received a call to Harvard, the 
oldest and the foremost of American universi- 
ties. Longfellow was born under a lucky star. 
To how many scholars has it been given to suc- 
ceed so rapidly? And now the spoiled darling 
of the Muses writes to his father that good luck 
has come to him at last, whereas it had never 
forsaken him for a moment. 

He makes a second tour of Europe; and again 
he makes it alone, his young wife having died 
after but a few weeks’ sojourn with him on the 
Continent. The poet tries to assuage his grief 
by zealous study. At Heidelberg he attends 
lectures on Shakespeare and Schiller, and makes 
the acquaintance of Gervinus; the beauties of 
nature and the pleasing sociability at Heidel- 
berg endear the old university town to him. 
Ever deeper Longfellow penetrates into Ger- 
man life and German literature; he reads Middle 
High German and more modern masterpieces 


122 American Literature 


with equal facility; German literature has 
henceforth a chief share in his culture and his 
poetic production. 

In the year 1836 he returns to Cambridge, and 
the lectures that he designed for 1837 show that 
German literature had made a most profound 
impression upon Longfellow’s universal spirit. 
Of the twelve lectures six are devoted to the 
Germans. And this scholar does not hesitate 
to devote two of the latter to a semi-contempo- 
rary, the author of Siebenkds, Jean Paul Richter. 

Henceforth Longfellow’s life flows on quietly 
and peacefully; the life of a thinker and poet, 
who, raised above parties, strives to realize in 
his activity the ideal of a man of culture. The 
still Sabbath peace, the solemn devoutness of a 
clear Sunday morning filled with sunshine and 
the warbling of birds, hover over Longfellow’s 
creations. 

The good and the noble in human nature, that 
is the real province of this American poet. ‘The 
heavenly daughters, Hope and Love, are the 
Muses to whom he owes his inspiration, and it 
is but fitting that full justice is done by the poet 
to the third in the union, Faith. The hope- 
ful, trusting, loving human heart he understood 
eminently well and voiced its feelings in con- 


a rr 


The Harvard Intellectuals 123 


vincing words; in depicting malice, often as he 
made the attempt, he never succeeded. 

Asa lyric poet Longfellow-is well-nigh German 
in his tenderness and melody, in his experiences 
and moods. ‘The German evensong (Abendlied) 
is unique in literature; what language can point 
to anything like “Fiillest wieder Busch und 
Thal,” or even ‘‘ Die Sonne sank?” Longfellow 
approaches very closely to the German Abend- 
lied. ‘The cozy twilight, the peaceful evening, 
the rejuvenating night—to these impressions 
his soul 1s most delicately attuned, and to them 
are we indebted for his most deep-felt, most 
genuine, one might say most German, verses: 
Vhe Light of the Stars, Hymn to the Night, Foot- 
steps of Angels, The Day Is Done, The Belfry of 
Bruges. The evening song dominates in Long- 
fellow’s lyricism, and he was fully conscious of 
it, for in the poems of 1846 an evening song 
opens and concludes the volume. 

The first stanzas of the poem Curfew may 
be cited as an example: 


Solemnly, mournfully, 
Dealing its dole, 
The Curfew Bell 


Is beginning to toll. 


124 American Literature 


Cover the embers 

And put out the light; 

Toil comes with the morning 
And rest with the night. 


Dark grow the windows, 
And quenched is the fire; 
Sound fades into silence— 
All footsteps retire. 


No voice in the chambers, 
No sound in the hall; 
Sleep and oblivion 

Reign over all! 


In his best productions, notably in those of 
his first period, Longfellow lays his scenes in 
medieval times, or at least in countries of the 
Catholic faith. Baumgartner,* one of his biog- 
raphers, observes that in this predilection of the 
poet the longing “that one faith, one Christian- 
ity, one Church, may again unite all nations 
into a single Christian family, finds expression.” 

Such an idea was altogether foreign to Long- 
fellow’s mind. To his peace-loving nature 


*Longfellow’s Dichtungen. Fin literarisches Zeitbild aus dem 
Geistesleben Nordamerikas, von Alexander Baumgartner, S. J. 
Zweite vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage. Mit Longfellow’s 
Portrait. Freiburg im Breisgau, Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 
1887. 


The Harvard Intellectuals 125 


every sort of controversy is repellent, and many 
passages might be cited from his prose and verse 
which plainly contradict such an interpretation 
as this. No, what captivated him in Catholic 
subjects was the plastic part that religious faith 
plays in them, on the one hand, and the vivid, 
variegated coloring on the other. ‘The Spanish 
Student”’ has the oft-treated story of Preciosa 
as its theme; the innocence of the pious maiden 
triumphs over all malice and baseness. In this 
play, hardly strong dramatically, the coloring 1s 
thoroughly Spanish, and invested, accordingly, 
with all the peculiarities of the Catholic char- 
acter. Whoever attaches weight to local color 
will find great enjoyment in reading the piece 
and will admire the impartiality of the poet; but 
who will be inclined to see in Preciosa a glorifica- 
tion of Catholic Spain? Did Weber perchance 
have that purpose in view when he popularized 
the same subject in Germany through his music? 

No less faithful as regards historical and 
local color is The Golden Legend, the story of 
Der arme Heinrich in dramatic form. It may 
be confidently asserted that the medieval poem 
occupies a higher place artistically, by its con- 
sistency and verity, than does the somewhat 
ambitious adaptation of the modern poet. 


Mg 


126 American Literature 


There the chief figures are boldly bodied forth, 
with powerful strokes; we comprehend per- 
fectly the maiden’s heroic deed, and equally 
the knight’s decision to accept so unnatural a 
sacrifice. Longfellow wished to make of the 
legend a comprehensive, one might almost say 


an exhaustive, picture of the Middle Ages. But 


the incidental matter is far too rich for the two 
leading figures of the drama. The poet has 
utilized here all the knowledge of the Middle 
Ages that he acquired in his painstaking studies. 
The Golden Legend is a plastic panorama, in 
which we behold the life of a German town in 
the twelfth century from the most varied points 
of view. And one cannot, indeed, marvel 
sufficiently at the fidelity with which Long- 
fellow presents all the conditions upon which he 
touches. He is almost more medieval than his 
prototype, Hartmannvon Aue. Themiracle play 
in the midst of the drama is a little masterpiece 
of imitation; were we to come across it in some 
library, in Old English orthography, we should 
without hesitation declare it to be a valuable 
find, a production of the thirteenth century. 

Tone and color, then, are medieval through 
andthrough. But the characters, their thoughts 
and emotions? 


The Harvard Intellectuals 127 


Longfellow has treated Der arme Heinrich 
not as a romantic but as an objective poet— 
indeed, were it not for Zola and his associates, 
one might very well say as a realist; the play 
is a historical painting, matter and color are 
from the Middle Ages, the soul is derived from 
our time. For what is the idea that animates 
the poet? Not the maiden’s longing for celestial 
beatitude, nor her spirit of self-sacrifice alone; 
for what then would signify the prologue, the 
storm of the Powers of the air about the Stras- 
burg Cathedral and the intervention of Lucifer? 
The underlying idea is clearly enough given at 
the close: 


It is Lucifer 

The son of mystery; 

And since God suffers him to be, 
He, too, is God’s minister, 

And labors for some good 

By us not understood. 


That is to say, “he is the Spirit that desires 
evil and produces good”’; in other words: Hate 
wishes to destroy us, love uplifts us. Whois not 
reminded here of Faust? As the fundamental 
idea of The Golden Legend differs from that of 


Der arme Heinrich, so also is the motive of the 


128 American Literature 


maiden humanized in Longfellow by a love that 
is earthly and yet so divine. 

Longfellow made repeated attempts to force 
the dramatic form—always without success. 
In 1868 appeared his “‘ New England Tragedies” ; 
one of the dramas has for its theme the persecu- 
tion of the Quakers in Boston, the other the 
burning of witches at Salem. Both pieces are 
failures, and are justly pronounced even by 
American critics to be unsatisfactory and un- 
palatable. Judas Maccabeus (1872) can hardly* 
be characterized, being no more than a sketch. 
In the Divine Tragedy the life and passion of 
Christ are represented with an intentional sim- 
plicity meant to remind us of the medieval 
mysteries. The Masque of Pandora (1875) 
treats the old myth in a style formed, indeed, 
upon great models, but which does not even 
distantly approach them. Longfellow’s last 
dramatic poem, Michael Angelo, is the biography 
of the hero in the shape of a dialogue, but again 
replete with carefully studied details like The 
Golden Legend, so that the reader obtains a 
faithful picture of the civilization of Italy in 
the sixteenth century. 

Narrative poetry Longfellow offers us in two 


*Schonbach, “Aufsatze,”’ p. 261. 


The Harvard Intellectuals 129 


forms—the ballad and the epic. Both give 
evidence of the German school through which 
he passed. The Skeleton in Armor, The Wreck 
of the Hesperus, and the other ballads are vigor- 
ous, fresh, stirring; the reader is carried away 
by the swing of the rhythm as with Burger, the 
sustained style creates an emotional tension as 
with Uhland. 

Of the epics, Evangeline, The Courtship of 
Miles Standish, Hiawatha, and Tales of a Way- 
side Inn, the first two are in hexameter, a 
mark that suggests Voss and Goethe. 

The widely read epic, Evangeline, relates how 
two young and hopeful lives are blighted by 
the clumsy, merciless interposition of a political 
measure. The English government orders a 
sudden attack upon the French village of Grand- 
Pré and the inhabitants are scattered to the 
four quarters of the earth. Thus Evangeline 
and her afhanced lover are torn asunder forever. 
Throughout her life Evangeline seeks the lost 
one; when an aged woman, she finds him dying 
ina hospital. As the use of the hexameter itself 
indicates, Longfellow was encouraged in_ his 
attempt by Hermann und Dorothea. He no- 
wise approached Goethe’s creation, however. 
The creation of human characters was not Lone- 


130 American Literature 


fellow’s strong point; the figures in Evangeline 
are bloodless shadows. 

The language is simple and popular. All the 
more discordant are certain labored similes, as 
in 


Sweet was her breath as the breath of kine that feed 
in the meadows. 


Or 


Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of 
heaven, 

Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the 
angels. 


Far above Evangeline stands the legend of 
Hiawatha. The matter is actually, as the poet 
says, taken 


From the forests and the prairies, 
From the great lakes of the Northland, 
From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands 


Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah, 


Feeds among the reeds and rushes. 


The primitive world of old America finds 
admirable expression in Hiawatha, and the hero, 
Hiawatha, the promoter of religion and peace, 


The Harvard Intellectuals 131 


has taught us moderns, too, who have advanced 
so far in culture, many a good precept. 

Longfellow enriched American literature by 
excellent translations from Old-English, Ger- 
man, Danish, Swedish, French, Italian (Dante), 
Portuguese, and Spanish. 

Of all Longfellow’s works The Golden Legend, 
Lvangeline, and Hiawatha have been the most 
widely read and have found the greatest rec- 
ognition. In truth, the poet gave his best in 
these productions, and the critic need add but a 
few lyrics in order to arrive at a judgment of his 
work and to designate his place in the literature 
of his people and of the world at large. 

Longfellow took Goethe’s saying about world- 
literature perhaps too seriously; rarely do we 
find in his works a note that takes hold of us as 
something new, never heard before. He reflects 
the literature of the old and the new time, of the 
East and the West. Heisa master of form; and 
in the art of entering into the spirit of a strange 
people he has scarcely a peer. He is the Herder 
of English literature. And as the words “Light, 
Love, Life!’’ decorate his tombstone, so the 
character of Lonegfellow’s poetry is best sum- 
marized by the words “‘ Faith, Love, and Hope.” 

3. HOLMES.—Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- 


132 American Literature 


1894) was likewise born under a lucky star, and 
the quintessence of his writings would be of the 
nature of a hymn of happiness. So profound, 
so clear-sighted, and at the same time so genial 
an optimist the world has perhaps never seen. 
Fate, to be sure, dealt very kindly with him. 
Holmes was extremely fortunate as son, friend, 
husband; vulgar cares he never knew; and, as a 
native American, there was little occasion for 
him to feel the weight of any political or social 
evils. But not all of his antecedents were as 
favorable to the philosopher as were the good 
family from which he sprang, the social inter- 
course and the new-world freedom which he en- 
joyed. The asceticism of the Calvinist Puritan, 
and his terrifying sense of sin, might well have 
stifled a philosophic inclination to laughter in 
this son and grandson of Puritans, had not 
Holmes possessed the gift of shaking off all these 
unwholesome influences of his ungenial sur- 
roundings. 

Holmes is a unique phenomenon; he has no 
parallel among the writers of any age. Born in 
1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he grows up 
surrounded by books and book-learning in an 
atmosphere of clergymen and university digni- 
taries; at the age of fifteen he goes to Phillips 


The Harvard Intellectuals 133 


Academy at Andover, where, under the disci- 
plinary rod of a teacher, stiff, narrow, orthodox 
to the core, he is to be won over to the charms of 
a theological career. When, after a year’s stay, 
he leaves the school, he is ready to study every- 
thing—except theology. First he tries law, 
but he soon abandons it for medicine. For 
three years he studies in America; then he pre- 
vails upon his father to allow him to finish his 
studies in Paris. In 1833, accordingly, he goes 
to France, adapts himself readily to Parisian 
conditions, 1s enthusiastic about the language, 
the food, the professors, and enjoys his youth to 
the full. From Paris he travels to get a glimpse 
of the Rhine, and makes a flying visit to Switzer- 
land and Italy. In 1836 Holmes is home again; 
in a not especially elegant street of Boston a 
red lamp announces that Dr. Holmes has begun 
his practice. The sick have at first no great 
confidence in the laughing physician. All the 
greater was his confidence in himself; in his 
thirty-first year he married—with his uncertain 
income a double hazard. But it turned out that 
he had won the grand prize in the lottery. His 
wife was the best, the most charming, the clever- 
est woman in the world. His practice, none 
too large, allowed him leisure for scientific work. 


134 American Literature 


He published a number of papers, among others 
a very severe polemic against homceopathy, and 
in 1847 he was appointed professor of anatomy 
and physiology at Harvard University. In the 
year 1882 he retired on a pension; four years 
later he sojourned in Europe for a hundred days, 
and in October, 1894, in the eighty-sixth year 
of his age, he slipped, almost in the midst of a 
chat, into the great realm of the unknown. 

These biographical details we gather more or 
less clearly from his table-talk books,* nor can 
much more be learned from the two-volume 
biography}. The author’s complete works in 
thirteen volumesf{ contain, in reality, all the 
material for a detailed biography; the docu- 
ments and letters appended to Morse’s work 
have in no way changed the picture of Holmes 
that we formed from his own writings. 

Holmes is the best representative of the spirit 
of the nineteenth century, 1f one 1s willing to 
reckon the last ten, or possibly the last fifteen, 
years as belonging to a new period. ‘The cen- 





* The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” 1857-58; “The Pro- 
fessor at the Breakfast-Table,”’ 1860; ‘‘ The Poet at the Breakfast- 
Table,” 1872; “Over the Teacups,”’ 1891. 

t“Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes,” by John T. 
Morse, Jr., London, 1896. 


tCambridge, Massachusetts, and London, 1891. 


The Harvard Intellectuals 13 5 


tury of natural sciences and inventions; of in- 
tellectual, moral, and political emancipation; 
the century that in all things explains the pres- 
ent by the past; the century that produced 
philosophers without systems—that marvelous 
century might be inferred from the writings of 
this American provincial were all other litera- 
ture to disappear from the face of the earth at 
the behest of a new Omar. 

The sequence of Holmes’s writings shows 
very clearly the advance of liberalism in the 
Anglo-Saxon world. With the utmost discre- 
tion is the domain which theologians and philos- 
ophers claim exclusively as their own touched 
upon in the first work, “The Autocrat of the 
Breakfast-Table” (1858). “‘Do you want an 
image,’ says the Autocrat, “of the human will 
or the self-determining principle as compared 
with its prearranged and impassable restric- 
tions? A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; 
you may see such a one in any mineralogical col- 
lection. One little fluid particle in thecrystalline 
prism of the solid universe!”’ 

“But you weaken moralobligations!”’ exclaim 
the company at table. 

“Weaken moral obligations? No, not weaken 
but define them.” 


136 American Literature 


Ten years later, 1868, the “‘ Professor” permits 
himself to handle these subjects quite differ- 
ently. Among the imaginary table companions 
there is a divinity student; the author has as- 
signed to this young man the role of agent pro- 
vocateur. His objections and reflections incite 
the Professor to ever greater boldness; they act 
as little obstructions which heighten the fresh- 
ness and vivacity of his flow of speech. 

“T am afraid,” he remarked, “you express 
yourself a little too freely on a most important 
class of subjects. Is there not danger in intro- 
ducing discussions or allusions relating to mat- 
ters of religion into common discourse?” 

‘Danger to what?’”’ I asked. 

‘Danger to truth,” he replied, after a slight 
pause. 

“T didn’t know Truth was such: an invalic. 
I said. ‘‘How long is it since she could only 
fake the air in aclose carniape’ . ¢ .  imen 
is tonon. oes ot il bby amt cay, 
that Truth gets well if she is run over by a loco- 
motive, while Error dies of lockjaw if she 
scratches her finger?”’ 

And now a conversation ensues 1n which the 
theologian is told the “‘truth.”’ Much of it 1s 
long since antiquated, but many a saying pro- 


The Harvard Intellectuals oy 


duces an effect of freshness and power as though 
the words were spoken to-day. 

“The active mind of the century is tending 
more and more to the two poles, Rome and 
Reason, the sovereign church or the free soul, 
authority or personality, God in us or God in 
our masters.” 

He waxes most vehement when it is a question 
of giving the coup de grace to the theological con- 
ception of sin: one sees how heavily the Calvinist 
consciousness of sin must have weighed upon 
his youth. 

Of course in these things a German can learn 
but little from Holmes; for it was in Germany 
that the natural sciences were first used as 
battering-rams against the theological strong- 
holds, and free souls, in the German sense, the 
Anglo-Saxon world has never even up to the pres- 
ent day produced in any considerable number. 
Philosophy on the other side of the channel 
and the ocean is still in large measure a hand- 
maid of theology; consciously or unconsciously, 
every philosopher is intent upon finding satis- 
factory answers, from a modern standpoint, to 
the old theological questions; the religious inter- 
est dominates—often tacitly—the study of an- 
tiquity and ethnology; even the agnostic spirits 


138 American Literature 


look to stones for disclosures which in Germany 
have long since ceased to be of interest. It 1s 
no wonder, then, that Holmes, too, the grandson 
and great-grandson of Puritans, concerns him- 
self so deeply with original sin; it is, on the con- 
trary, very remarkable that he has devoted so 
little space to that subject. [or it 1s not re- 
ligion or the philosophy of religion, but philos- 
ophy in its most modern sense, that he is above 
all concerned with. Holmes is primarily a psy- 
chologist; and he was certainly the precursor, 
perhaps the teacher, of the Germans in a very 
essential chapter of psychology. 

The “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” which 
first obtained a name and a following in Ger- 
many in 1869 through Eduard von Hartmann, 
was presented in a masterly way, and ardently 
advocated, by Holmes fully eleven years earlier 
(7898). In as*hor; ob course.) a philosophical 
system, for it is not in the plan of the breakfast- 
table to present systems; but those observations 
of the year 1858 contain, in the germ and in epi- 
erammatic form, the fundamental ideas of the 
new doctrine which gained such popularity 
through Hartmann. Ten years later he 
Professor at the Breakfast-Table” takes up the 
reflections of the ‘Autocrat’? at more than one 


The Harvard Intellectuals 139 


point, and in June, 1870, Holmes delivered 
before the famous Harvard chapter of the Phi 
Beta Kappa Society his address on Mechanism 
in Thought and Manners, which aims to combine 
these aphorisms into a sort of system. The 
essay bears at its head Pascal’s significant 
motto: ‘“‘Car il ne faut pas se meconnaitre; 
nous sommes automates autant qu’ esprit.” 

Holmes makes very little ado about his contri- 
bution to the knowledge of the unconscious. 
In the first place, he takes the greatest pains to 
point out the elements of that knowledge in 
Leibnitz and mentions a number of contempo- 
rary scholars, in order to show how the Philos- 
ophy of the Unconscious occupied the attention 
of all psychologists in the sixties. 

“The readers of Hamilton and Mill, of Aber- 
crombie, Laycock, and Maudsley, of Sir John 
Herschel, of Carpenter, of Lecky, of Dallas, 
will find many variations on the text of Leibnitz, 
some new illustrations, a new classification and 
nomenclature of the facts; but the root of the 
matter is all to be found in his writings.” 

Secondly,the witty American’s own reflections 
are so highly spiced that their scientific sig- 
nificance, their deep earnestness, may easily 
escape the reader. The very first remark of the 


140 American Literature 


‘Autocrat,’ which is meant to acquaint us with 
the workings of the Unconscious, is calculated 
to arouse mirth rather than deep reflection. 
“You don’t suppose that my remarks made at 
this table are like so many postage stamps, do 
you—each to be only once uttered? 

I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea 
often... ~ <A thought 4s often onesie, 
though you have uttered it a hundred times. 
It has come to you over a new route, by a new 
and express train of associations. Sometimes, 
but rarely, one may be caught making the same 
speech twice over, and yet be held blameless. 
Thus, a certain lecturer, after performing in an 
inland city, where dwells a Littératrice of note, 
was invited to meet her and others over the 
social teacup. She pleasantly referred to his 
many wanderings in his new occupation. ‘Yes,’ 
he replied, ‘I am like the Huma, the bird that 
never. lichts.”) .> 4.0 2) Years. elapsed. ite 
lecturer visited the same place once more: for 
the same purpose. Another social cup after 
the lecture, and a second meeting with the dis- 
tinguished lady. ‘You are constantly going 
from place to place,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ he an- 
swered, ‘I am like the Huma > and finished 
the sentence as before. What horrors when it 





The Harvard Intellectuals 141 


flashed over him that he had made this fine 
speech, word for word, twice over! Yet it was 
not true, as the lady might perhaps have fairly 
inferred, that he had embellished his conversa- 
tion with the Huma daily during the whole 
interval of years. On the contrary, he had 
never once thought of the odious fowl until the 
recurrence of precisely the same circumstances 
brought up precisely the same idea.” 

No less facetious, only far more profound, is 
the following observation: ‘‘I want to make 
a literary confession now, which I believe no- 
body has made before me. You know very well 
that I write verses sometimes, because [ have 
read some of them at this table. (The com- 
pany assented—two or three of them in a re- 
signed sort of way, as I thought, as if they sup- 
posed I had an epic in my pocket and were 
eoing to read half a dozen books or so for their 
benefit.) I continued: Of course I write some 
lines or passages which are better than others; 
some which, compared with the others, might 
be called relatively excellent. It is in the nature 
of things that I should consider these relatively 
excellent lines or passages as absolutely good. 
So much must be pardoned to humanity. Now 
I never wrote a ‘good’ line in my life but the 


142 American Literature 


moment after it was written it seemed a hundred 
years old. Very commonly I had a sudden con- 
viction that I had seen it somewhere. Possibly 
I may have sometimes unconsciously stolen it, 
but I do not remember that I ever once detected 
any historical truth in these sudden convictions 
of the antiquity of my new thought or phrase. 

This is the philosophy of it. (Here 
the number of the company was diminished by a 
small secession.) Any new formula which sud- 
denly emerges in our consciousness has its roots 
in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when 
it first makes its appearance among the recog- 
nized growths of our intellect. Any crystalline 
group of musical words has had a long and still 
period to form in.” 

How immense the range Holmes assigns to 
the Unconscious, how far-reaching the effects 
he ascribes to it, may be descried in the following 
conceit: ‘There is a natural tendency in many 
persons to run their adjectives together in 
triads, as I have heard them called—thus: He 
was honorable, courteous, and brave; she was 
graceful, pleasing, and virtuous. Dr. Johnson 
is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who 
said you could separate a paper in the ‘Rambler’ 
into three distinct essays. Many of our writers 


The Harvard Intellectuals 143 


show the same tendency—my friend, the Pro- 
fessor, especially. Some think it is in humble 
imitation of Johnson—some that it is for the 
sake of the stately sound only. I don’t think 
they get to the bottom of it. It is, I suspect, an 
instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind 
to present a thought or image with the three 
dimensions which belong to every solid. 
It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove 
it, and a great deal easier to dispute it than to 
disprove it. But mind this: the more we ob- 
serve and study, the wider we find the range of 
the automatic and instinctive principles in body, 
mind, and morals, and the narrower the limits 
of the self-determining conscious movement.” 
The predominance of the Unconscious in our 
psychic life, and the great influence of heredity, 
are perhaps the only two theories of natural 
science which Holmes advances with almost 
dogmatic assurance and steadily insists upon. 
He even wrote two novels, ‘‘Elsie Venner’’ and 
“The Guardian Angel,” in order to expound his 
views regarding the prevailing ideas of sin and 
personal responsibility. Otherwise, however, his 
attitude is that of smiling skepticism toward 
all dogmas, even those of natural science. He is 
enthusiastic about his vocation, he loves science 


144 American Literature 


and delights royally in its successes, particularly 
where it annihilates blind credulity. 

But it is just this that makes this lovable 
personality so unique, so wonderfully engaging. 
Holmes is the laughing philosopher, not only 
as regards theology, but also as regards the nat- 
ural sciences and even himself. 

‘The Professor,” he says of himself (for the 
“Autocrat,” the “Professor,” and the “Poet” 
are, of course, really one and the same person), 
‘considers himself, and I consider him, a very 
useful and worthy kind of drudge. I think he 
has a pride in his small technicalities. I know 
that he has a great idea of fidelity; and though 
I suspect he laughs a little inwardly at times 
at the grand airs ‘Science’ puts on, as she stands 
marking time, but not getting on, while the 
trumpets are blowing and the big drums beating 
—yet I am sure he has a liking for his specialty 
and a repect for its cultivators.” 

Hereis Holmes to the life, the laughing philos- 
ophersummed up inbrief: humanity is a comedy, 
but we all are at once actors and spectators—let 
us not be spoil-sports; let every one take his part 
as well as he can, and play his réle (which, in- 
deed, he has not selected himself) with consum- 
mate art, if possible. 


ae 


The Harvard Intellectuals 145 


Holmes says that he never really hated a man; 
we may declare, upon the unanimous testimony 
of his survivors, that no man ever suffered on 
account of him. 

Old age, said to be uncongenial to all men, is 
the surest test of a philosopher; Holmes stood 
the test splendidly. At fifty he wrote a charm- 
ing causerie about old age—a rather objective 
topic to him as yet; at sixty he returned fear- 
lessly to the unpleasant theme, and after he had 
passed his eightieth year he jested as delight- 
fully about it as if it had been infinitely remote 
from him. 

“The meaning of it all,” he relates in the 
volume which is entitled ‘‘Over the Teacups,” 
and which concludes the series of table talks, 
“was that this was my birthday. My friends, 
near and distant, had seen fit to remember it. 

Gifts of pretty and pleasing objects 


Mere displayed ona side table...) ow 
oa was lt... 1 had ‘cleared the eight- 
barred gate . . . I was a trespasser on the 


domain belonging to another generation. ‘The 
children of my coevals were fast getting gray 
and bald, and their children beginning to look 
upon the world as belonging to them, and not 
tO tnell. sites.and grandsires, |... Ut on 


146 American Literature 


the other hand, I remember that men of science 
have maintained that the natural life of man 1s 
nearer fivescore than threescore years and ten. 
I always think of a familiar experience which I 
bring from the French cafés, well known to me 
im my early. manhood.: +. 4 <A: euest of tne 
establishment is sitting at his little table, He 
has just had his coffee, and the waiter is serving 
him with his petit verre . . . the gest is 
calling to the waiter, ‘Garcon! et le bain de 
pieds!’ The little glass stands in a small tin 
saucer or shallow dish, and the custom is to 
more than fill the glass, so that some extra 
brandy runs over into this tin saucer or cup- 
plate, to the manifest gain of the consumer. 

“Life is a petit verre of a very peculiar kind of 
spirit. At seventy years it used to be said that 
the little glass was full. We should be more apt 
fo; put it at-eighty m our days. 2. (lam 
willing to concede that all after fourscore is the 
‘bain de pieds.’” 

4. LOWELL.—James Russell Lowell (1819- 
1891) was ambitious, on his first appearance as 
a humorist, to imitate and, if possible, surpass 
the wit of Thomas Hood, which consists essen- 
tially in a play upon words. In this aspiration 
he had the desired success. The poem 4 Fable 











The Harvard Intellectuals 147 


for Critics, which appeared in 1848, is a brilliant 
coruscation of deliciously happy puns, one more 
surprising than the other, and irresistible as a 
whole. 

Pheebus Apollo is sitting idly in the shade of a 
laurel, when an American critic, D. (the person 
indicated is Duyckink, the publisher of the 
“Cyclopedia of American Literature”) ap- 
proaches, and they engage in a conversation 
upon literature. Apollo now takes aim at 2 
number of noted American writers, and sketches 
a brief portrait of each. Emerson, Alcott, 
Willis, Parker, Dana, Neal, Bryant, Whittier, 
Hawthorne, Cooper, Margaret Fuller (under the 
pseudonym “ Miranda”), Halleck, Franco, Ir- 
ving, Poe, Holmes, and Lowell himself—are al] 
assigned the most amiable characteristics; even 
Margaret Fuller, whom the poet could not abide, 
comes off well. Apollo bewails the fate of his 
Daphne, who, as is well known, was able to 
escape his stormy wooing only by the gods trans- 
forming her into a laurel, in the following verses: 


When last I saw my love, she was fairly embarked 

In a laurel, as she thought—but (ah, how Fate 
mocks!) 

She has found it by this time a very bad box; 

Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it, 


148 American Literature 


You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve 
treed it. 

Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s 
mistress! 

What romance would be left?—who can flatter or 
kiss trees?! 

And, for mercy’s sake, how could one keep up a 
dialogue 

With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a 
log,— 

Not to say that the thought would forever intrude 

That you’ve less chance to win her the more she is 
wood? 

Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still 
grieves, 

To see those loved graces all taking their leaves; 

Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting but 
now, 

As they left me forever, each making its bough! 

If her tongue had a tang sometimes more than was 
right, 

Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite. 


And as if in these efforts he had not proved 
himself sufficiently a disciple of Thomas Hood, 
he wrote two years later, 1850, the poem, The 
Unhappy Lot of Mr. Knott, which outdoes even 
the Fable for Critics in play upon words. Other 
means, too, to achieve humorous effects, such 
as have become customary in English verse 


The Harvard, Intellectuals 149 


since the time of Byron and Frere—the bur- 
lesque reference to time-honored things, and 
extraneous matter such as the use of foreign 
proper names and the rhyming of foreign words, 
but, above all, the broken rhyme—were em- 
ployed by Lowell in most abundant measure. 
Lowell gained instruction from Byron on more 
than one point; or he studied under the same 
masters, namely, the rationalist Pope and his 
successors, to whom English literature 1s in- 
debted for a great number of highly polished, 
even though hardly very profound or weighty, 
aphorisms. The Fable for Critics contains many 
current impressions about literature and crit- 
icism; many a rhymed couplet can even to-day 
be applied as a motto for existing conditions. 
Thus, for example, what is said about the erudite 
critic who can fill pages about books long since 
recognized but is struck helplessly dumb when 
he confronts a new literary apparition: 


But give him a new book, fresh out of the heart, 
And you put him at sea without compass or chart. 


Against the prevalent view that lyric stands 
so far below epic art, he says: 


A grass-blade’s no easier to make than an oak. 


150 American Literature 


The satirical digressions, too, into domains 
which have no connection with the actual theme, 
such as the thrusts against the advocates of cap- 
ital punishment and of slavery, Lowell learned 
from Byron. 

A digression, likewise, is the song of praise to 
Massachusetts, but not of a satirical kind, in- 
spired as it is by a glowing love of his native soil. 

To Lowell as lyric poet we are indebted for an 
abundance of melodious verse and not a few 
happy delineations of inward experiences. The 
First Snowfall, in its directness of feeling and 
simplicity of expression, is the most moving of 
elegies, and that in a literature so eminently 
rich in elegies. Strange to say, American 
readers of Lowell have given the preference to 
his poem, After the Burial—perhaps because it 
bewails three losses at once, the death of two 
children and a beloved wife. 

Lowell’s Odes—on the battle of Concord, on 
Washington’s assumption of the command of 
the American forces, and on the Fourth of July 
—are patriotic without degenerating into bom- 
bast; as, indeed, all of Lowell’s occasional poems 
confine themselves within the limits of good 
TASCE, 

The famous ‘‘ Biglow Papers’”’ are verses by 


The Harvard Intellectuals I51 


the provincial Hosea Biglow relating to the 
questions of the day, in the Yankee dialect. 
Lowell entirely renounced here the artificial re- 
course to puns, foreign words, and labored, 
erotesque rhymes, which would, of course, have 
been out of keeping with Hosea’s illiterate per- 
sonality. He produced his powerful effects ex- 
clusively by the sheer originality of a speech 
humorous in itself and by the native wit of the 
Yankee. The celebrated “‘confession of faith,” 
cited a thousand times, may be given as an ex- 
ample: 


I du believe with all my soul 
In the gret press’s freedom, 
To pint the people to the goal 
An’ in the traces lead ’em; 
Palsied the arm thet forges jokes 
At my fat contracts squintin’, 
An’ withered be the nose that pokes 
Inter the gov’ment printin’! 


I du believe thet I should give 

Wut’s his’n unto Cesar, 
For it’s by him I move an’ live, 

Frum him my bread and cheese air; 
I du believe thet all o’ me 

Doth bear his souperscription— 
Will, conscience, honor, honesty, 

An’ things o’ thet description. 


152 American Literature 


I du believe in prayer an’ praise 
To him thet hez the grantin’ 
O’ jobs—in everythin’ that pays, 
But most of all in CANTIN’; 
This doth my cup with marcies fill, 
This lays all thought o’ sin to rest— 
I don’t believe in princerple, 
But, O, | du in interest. 


I DU believe in Freedom’s cause, 
Ez fur away as Paris is; 
I love to see her stick her claws 
In them infarnal Pharisees; 
It’s wal enough agin a king 
To dror resolves an’ triggers— 
But libbaty’s a kind o’ thing 
Thet don’t agree with niggers. 


Lowell’s Essays owed their origin in great part 
to lectures; they are, consequently, character- 
ized by both the merits and the defects of the 
spoken word. ‘They are addressed to a limited 
circle of persons, who are presumably upon a 
somewhat like level of culture; who, at any rate, 
are prepared in a certain measure for the sub- 
ject of the discourse. ‘This often leads the lec- 
turer to content himself with a brief intimation. 
In the printed essay, which is addressed to the 
world at large, this brevity sometimes produces 
an effect of paucity and obscurity. 


The Harvard Intellectuals jen) 


The humor of the Essays becomes ponderous 
at times by being based too largely upon literary 
reminiscences and far-fetched allusions. The 
delicious Moosehead Journal (1853), in its pres- 
ent shape, yields ready enjoyment only to the 
highly educated; had not Lowell, on the very 
first page, conjured up Virgil, Kenelm Digby, 
and Empedocles, its fresh, popular tone and its 
wealth of brilliant fancies would regale thou- 
sands of readers. By his dauntless devotion 
to truth alone, Lowell’s literary criticism towers 
above that worship of success, tending to half- 
truths and all manner of compromises, which 
marked the Victorian age. When Carlyle was 
at the zenith of his fame (1866), Lowell wrote 
that estimate,* which, with all its urbanity and 
reverence, made the hollow thunder-din of 
Carlyle’s verbosity ridiculous. In a few deli- 
cious epigrams he disposed of the stage-lightning 
of Carlyle, the supposed demigod. ‘“‘Mr. Carlyle 
is for calling down fire from Heaven whenever 
he cannot readily lay his hand on the match- 


bed 


box.’’—‘‘ Cromwell would have scorned him as a 
babbler more long-winded than Prynne 
Friedrich would have scoffed at his tirades as 


dummes Zeug.’ And the same _ inexorable 





Piterdny. ssaysl,-77 i. 


154 American Literature 


judge is the most unstinting, the most enthu- 
silastic, admirer of genuine greatness. No 
German has paid so high a tribute to the genius 
and character of Lessing as has Lowell; no pro- 
fessional politician has so enthusiastically lauded 
the civic patriotism of great Americans of the 
stamp of Josiah Quincy and James Abram Gar- 
held. The delectable and refreshing thing about 
Lowell is that in spite of his predilection for the 
utterance of generalizations, which often comes 
dangerously near to Puritan didacticism, he 
always remains natural, spontaneous, chatty, 
playful. When he relates in his ‘‘ Leaves from 
My Journal in the Mediterranean,” how he 
made the acquaintance of the Chief Mate, he 
does not content himself with recounting the 
fact that the Mate admired his pocket-knife, 
but (genuine Lowellesque: a little nature, a 
little human nature, and a great deal of I) he 
appends a generalization: ‘I like folks who 
like an honest bit of steel. . . . There is 
always more than the average human nature in 
a man who has a hearty sympathy with iron. 
It is a manly metal, with no sordid associations 
like gold and silver.”’ Not exactly new, not 
astonishing, but individual, spontaneous, con- 
vincing. Lowell had a profound sympathy for 


The Harvard Intellectuals ros 


the unadulterated soul of the people, for persons 
in the lowest ranks. His spirit always found 
repose and refreshment in intercourse with the 
unlettered, ‘‘like what the body feels in cush- 
iony moss.” Conversation with people of kin- 
dred pursuits he likens to the grinding of the 
upper and nether millstones, which wear each 
other smooth. Genuine human nature was 
always a source of delight to him. He found 
it “wholesome as a potato, fit company for any 
dish.”’ His wit rejoiced in the comedy of homely 
topics. One need only instance his little known 
but deliciously humorous translation of Prof. 
F. J. Child’s [1 Pesceballo (The Fishball!), 
a mock Italian operetta.* 

5. KINDRED sPIRITS.—Ihe cosmopolitan tra- 
dition of Harvard is represented by other men 
besides these. Charles Eliot Norton (1827- 
1908) maintained the relationship with the great 
men of England. To him we are indebted for 
the publication of the correspondence between 
Goethe and Carlyle (1886), the ‘‘Letters of 
eR howell (1893), and ‘lhe Letters of John 
Ruskin” (1904). 

George Ticknor (1791-1887) wrote “A His- 


*Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1862. Reprinted by Thomas B. 
Mosher, Portland, Maine, 1911. 


156 American Literature 


tory of Spanish Literature” (1849) which has 
not to this day been surpassed. 

Francis James Child (1825-1896) became 
famous the world over by his monumental work, 
‘English and Scottish Popular Ballads’’ (1859). 

Thomas Wentworth Higginson has a trait 
in common with the great ones of Harvard—his 
versatility; and Barrett Wendell is an excellent 
representative of literary history at the famous 
seat of learning. 

A figure of a peculiar kind of greatness, such 
as could perhaps be produced on Massachusetts 
soil alone, is Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909), 
who did notable work as journalist, story-teller, 
preacher, historian. By his famous story, ‘‘ The 
Man Without a Country,” he will perhaps out- 
live all the celebrities of the day. 


CHAPTER OVE 
FHE PSYCHOLOGICAL, tear 


1. HISTORICAL CONNECTIONS 


Botu Poe and Hawthorne were affected by the 
influence of that blood-curdling romanticism 
which in England, too, had its after-effects up to 
the middle of the nineteenth century, as is evi- 
denced by Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte. 
The Americans, however, borrowed only the 
mood and the technical methods of the blood- 
curdling romance; of the medieval apparatus— 
the historical setting and the belief in ghosts— 
there is not a trace. All the thrills and terrors 
in Hawthorne and Poe are produced by the dark 
sides of man’s inner life. The problems first 
presented in artistic form by E. T. A. Hoffman 
—of dual personality, of the migration of souls, 
and other questions from the infinite domain of 
the unconscious and the semi-conscious—have a 
particular fascination for Hawthorne and Poe.* 


*Attention should be drawn to the fact that at the time when 
Poe and Hawthorne took their themes from the realm of the un- 
conscious, Oliver Wendell Holmes was seeking to illuminate this 
darkness with his clear understanding. 


157 


158 American Literature 


Hawthorne’s journals show in more than one 
passage that he contemplated for many years 
making the identity of soul of an English 
ancestor and his American descendant the sub- 
ject of a novel, and “The Marble Faun” is es- 
sentially a precipitate of that idea. But while 
Hawthorne, a pronounced rationalist, never 
abandoned the firm ground of the world of sense, 
of the perceptible, only toying with spiritualism 
and mesmerism, Poe has given expression to all 
occult thoughts, all the twilight states of the 
soul—analyzed dream and swoon, death and 
resurrection, mental darkness, and the hallu- 
cinations of the criminal. Along with this in- 
tense interest in the purely psychological, Poe 
and Hawthorne had the keenest sense for their 
material surroundings. What Poe says more 
than once about his problematic characters 
applies both to him and to Hawthorne: they 
possessed a faculty of perception which no de- 
tail escaped. This marvelous combination 
of the keenest perception of the external 
world with a never-resting dissection of the 
soul, of a realistic feeling for environment with 
fancies so far removed from earth, is the dis- 
tinguishing characteristic of Hawthorne and 


Poe. 


The Psychological ‘Tale 159 


2. POE.—To understand Edgar Allen Poe 
(1809-1849), it 1s essential to know the story of 
his life. 

Poe was born in Boston in 1809, but was de- 
scended on his father’s side from an old and 
highly respected Maryland family. ‘The grand- 
father of the poet took a prominent part in the 
War of Independence and was a friend of La- 
fayette. The father was not true to type. 
Instead of studying law, as the family had ex- 
pected, he went on the stage and married Eliza- 
beth Arnold, an actress of English descent. 
Edgar was two years old when he lost both his 
parents. A childless pair in Richmond adopted 
the little boy. The husband, having occasion 
to go to London on business, took his wife 
and the boy with him; thus Edgar was placed 
in an English school, such as he describes in his 
story, “William Wilson.” Returning to Amer- 
ica, he first attended a high school, then the 
University of Virginia. He was a highly gifted 
student, not lacking in industry, and was already 
versed in Latin, French, and Italian literature. 
But now and then he fell a victim to the demon 
of play, and outdid his college-mates in drinking 
as well; by the close of his first and only year 
at the university he had incurred a gambling 


160 American Literature 


debt of two thousand dollars. His adoptive 
father put him into business. Poe soon ran 
away from it. When his money gave out he 
enlisted as a private soldier, and persevered in 
the service fully two years, until he was released 
by his adoptive father, who secured his appoint- 
ment to the Military Academy at West Point. 
There he neglected his duties and was ignomini- 
ously dismissed (1831). Poe was now entirely 
dependent upon his pen; from this time to his 
awful end he is scarcely ever free from want and 
care. Not that his poetic genius lacked recogni- 
tion. The gifted novelist, John P. Kennedy, 
admired him greatly, and made him editor of 
The Southern Literary Messenger. Kennedy had 
no occasion to regret his choice, for Poe made 
the journal famous. He had married a cousin, 
Virginia Clemm, an ideally beautiful girl of 
thirteen, and he was ecstatically happy. But 
social dissipation, such as was customary in the 
luxurious South, robbed him of reputation and 
bread. Wine was poison to his hypersensitive 
nerves. After he had been drinking, he was 
simply sick for days. Thus he lost his posi- 
tion, and he moved with his young wife and her 
mother, a very fine character—the touching 
poem, 7'’o My Mother, is addressed to her—hrst 


The Psychological Tale 161 
to New York, then to Philadelphia, then back 


again to New York. For years he refrained 
conscientiously from all alcoholic drinks. All 
his thoughts were centred at that time upon at- 
taining fame as a writer and providing the com- 
forts of life for a wife whom he idolized. His 
sensitive temperament, his pride, the conscious- 
ness of his superiority to the mediocrity which 
figures so prominently in the press—all this was 
not calculated to make friends for him. The 
year 1845 brought him the coveted renown, for 
The Raven had appeared and was greeted in 
America and England with a storm of applause. 
But it came too late. His wife had been a con- 
sumptive for years, and Poe suffered daily 
martyrdom in beholding her struggle with 
death. After she passed away (1847) there 
was an end to his self-restraint. He had not 
even sufficient strength of character to keep the 
memory of his great love unsullied, but flitted 
in sentimental amorousness from one woman 
to another. On the 3rd of October, 1849, he 
was found unconscious in Baltimore amid the 
most sordid surroundings; a few days later he 
died in a hospital. 

America, as if somewhat to counterbalance the 
abnormal realism of the majority, has produced 


162 American Literature 


a number of abnormal visionaries such as per- 
haps no other country in the nineteenth century 
can show. Poe, Emerson, Walt Whitman, in 
spite of their clear, keenly observant vision, go 
through life as in a dream. And of the three 
Poe is perhaps the most remote from the ma- 
terial. His imagination is so powerful that it 
transforms the world of sense into pure fable 
and symbols, into ideas and arithmetical prob- 
lems, into poetical tissues. Everything that 
he sees and experiences subtilizes itself for him 
into a dreamlike narrative or an ethereal poem. 
He was about twelve years old when he came 
across a woodland lake in Scotland. Instantly 
the dark lake overshadowed by pines appeared 
to him an Avernus which aroused all the agonies 
of death within him, and at the same time 
brought the solace of deliverance from the 
bondage of intolerable fancies. The poem based 
upon that experience, The Lake, is a marvel 
of language, melody, and imagination, when 
one considers the youth of its author, and at the 
same time it sounds the underlying note of his 
poetic art. While for other and happier poets— 
for a Dickens or a Walt Whitman—the world is 
a fairyland with infinite joys and pleasures, for 
Poe it is filled with spectres, mortal anguish, the 


The Psychological Tale 163 


mouldy odor of the grave. Nowhere else is Poe, 
the poet, so intense, so true, so compelling, as in 
that masterly combination of euphony and grue- 
some imagery which appears for the first time 
as the story “Ligeia,” and as The Conqueror 
Worm in the collected works. Had the death 
of his parents made so indelible an impression 
upon the soul of the child of two, or is the germ 
of this disposition of his mind to be found in his 
ancestry? Poe’s biographers have thus far 
given no answer to the question. 

Narrowness and malice have done much to 
make difficult the comprehension of Poe’s dis- 
tinctive art. One of the seemingly ineradicable 
errors, one which, it is true, was furthered by 
Poe himself, is the view that he was merely a 
virtuoso, in the sense of the young Romanticists 
of France, in the sense of the maxim ‘“‘art for 
art’s sake’; an artist in words pure and simple, 
as there are artists in color, in marble, in mosaic, 
in brick, in iron and concrete. Given a certain 
task and a certain material, the artist produces 
the required work according to his endowment, 
without inner experience, without inner com- 
pulsion. 

The myth, created by Poe himself, that The 
Raven was the result of pure calculation, cold 


164 American Literature 


reflection, and that view of the essence of poetic 
art which he has repeatedly expressed in his 
critical essays, explains the origin of this error. 
Poe’s poems did not originate in any such way. 
Perhaps The Bells, possibly The Raven, assuredly 
no other. All of Poe’s lyricism has its roots in 
experience; it is personal, in spite of its sem- 
blance of objectivity. The polished verses of 
The Conqueror Worm produce an impression of 
sententiousness, of universality. What can be 
more impersonal than the thought of the all- 
destroyer, Death? And yet even that poem is 
a personal experience. Poe wrote it at the bed- 
side of his sick wife. 

The tales, too, contain far more of the per- 
sonal than one would suppose. We have, to 
begin with, the weird fantasy, “Ligeia,” with its 
intricate scrollwork of exotic decoration. One 
would surmise a reminiscence of the Arabian 
Nights and of Monk Lewis. But we know that 
the soul of the narrative, the will to live, famed 
daily, hourly; into the poet’s sight from the 
eyes of his dying wife and compelled him to give 
it embodiment and poetic shape. The same 
applies to “William Wilson”’ and other tales. 

Poe and Hawthorne developed the short 
story, introduced into literature by Washington 


The Psychological Tale 165 


Irving, to its highest perfection. Hawthorne’s 
tales are essentially the embodiment of a psy- 
chological idea, or an allegory; in Poe, on the 
other hand, three species of stories are to be 
distinguished: 

1. Psychological problems for their own 
sake.—Such are the tales: ‘““The Pit and the 
Fendulum, “lhe Black Cat; .“ The Facts in 
the Case of M. Waldemar,” “The Cask of 
Amontillado,” ‘“‘The Fall of the House of 
Usher,” “William Wilson,” “Ligeia.” 

2. Pseudo-scientific phantasies.—Such are: 
“The Adventures of one Hans Pfaal,” ““A De- 
scent into the Maélstrom.”’ 

3. Ingenious disentanglements.—These are 
of two kinds. A seemingly senseless jumble 
of signs and figures on a scrap of paper is 
deciphered by the hero of the story as the 
description of a place where a treasure of tre- 
mendous value is hidden. ‘‘The Gold Bug”’ 1s 
the typical representative of this species. The 
second sort is the detective story. The eccen- 
tric Parisian, Dupin, with his incomparable 
gift of analysis, is the hero of “The Murders 
in the Rue Morgue” and ‘The Purloined 
Letter.” 

An unparalleled boldness of invention, mas- 


166 American Literature 


terly structure, a compelling logic, are common 
to all three species. It is a capital observation 
made by the American professor, Alphonso 
Smith, a remark that penetrates into the inner- 
most essence of Poe, that his genius was of the 
architectural order. In his briefest poem, as in 
his longest tale, everything is characterized by 
the most perfect harmony; the relation of the 
individual parts to each other, as well as that of 
the individual parts to the whole, is ideal. It 
is all a matter of artistic design, artistic effective- 
ness—but only to the eye of the reflecting critic; 
he who reads for enjoyment has not the slightest 
suspicion of the consciously manipulated tech- 
nique of the poet, to him all seems spontaneous 
nature. 

Poe’s language is elevated throughout, in his 
prose as well as his verse; in its aversion to all 
that is vulgar it is even the least bit labored. 
Be the subject ever so repellent, the situation 
ever so mean—this can never tempt him to use 
a coarse word. Where a word of Latin deriva- 
tion is in rivalry with an Anglo-Saxon one of 
the same significance, Poe prefers the former. 
This, strange to say, he has in common with the 
much-derided rhetoric of his compatriots. 

Poe was amazingly well-read and had an ex- 


The Psychological Tale 167 


ceptional memory. ‘This accounts for the cir- 
cumstance that in reading his verse one now 
and again has an impression of plagiarism. 

The last couplet of the first stanza of the 
poem For Annie— 


And the fever called “ Living” 
Is conquered at last, 


which Longfellow admired so much that he sug- 
gested it as an epitaph for the unhappy poet, 
is a reminder of Shakespeare’s “‘Life’s fitful 
fever.” 

The effective concluding verse of every stanza 
in the world-famous poem The Raven, with the 
refrainlike words more—evermore—nevermore, 
had occurred in Longfellow, and in one of the 
earliest of Lowell’s poems (Threnodia, 1839). 

More striking 1s the resemblance between the 
third stanza of the same poem, The Raven, and 
a passage in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Lady 
Geraldine’s Courtship. 

Poe has it: 


And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple 
curtain 

Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never 
felt before. 


168 American Literature 


The corresponding couplet in Mrs. Browning’s 
poem reads: 


With a murmurous stir uncertain, in the air the 
purple curtain 

Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless, 
pale brows. 


Nevertheless, one would hesitate to raise the 
charge of plagiarism against Poe, as he heedlessly 
did against Longfellow and Aldrich. We know 
that he was very familiar with Mrs. Browning’s 
poems and that he admired them; it is to her, 
indeed, that he dedicated the collection The 
Raven and other Poems in almost hyperbolical 
language. Her words simply came to his pen, 
without his recognizing them as her property— 
that was all. It was assuredly not plagiarism, 
but unconscious reminiscence, for Poe was an 
extraordinarily well-read man, versed in many 
domains of literature. One only wonders when 
and where he read all the long-forgotten, strange 
books which he cites. The English mystic, 
Joseph Glanvil, furnishes him with the funda- 
mental idea for the story “Ligeia”; “The Fall 
of the House of Usher’ shows that he was a 
student of Swedenborg and other occult masters, 





The Psychological Tale 169 


not to mention the treatises of natural philos- 
ophy to which he is indebted for the material 
of his pseudo-scientific stories, such as “Hans 
Pfaal” and “‘ The Descent into the Maélstrom.”’ 

We should have a goodly catalogue were we to 
name all the literary influences, demonstrated 
or surmised, to which Poe was subject. Let us 
mention Schiller, whose Geisterseher appeared in 
the English language, on American soil, as early 
as 1798. If Poe did not read the famous work, 
he was certainly familiar with Charles Brockden 
Brown’s imitation, Wieland.* ‘Then there 1s 
E. T. A. Hoffman, to whom Poe owes the 
impulse of at least five tales;t and Samuel 
Taylor Coleridge, whom Poe cites with the 
greatest veneration, and whose famous poem, 
The Ancient Mariner, may be regarded as a 
starting-point for the “Manuscript Found in a 
Bottle.” 

Poe’s indebtedness to his predecessors be- 
comes altogether a vanishing quantity when 
one compares it with the debt which the litera- 
ture of the last sixty years owes to him. Aside 


*Walter Just, “Die romantische Bewegung in der Amerikan- 
ischen Literatur.”’ Berlin, 1910, p. 26-31. 

+Palmer Cobb, “The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the 
Tales of Edgar Allen Poe,’ Chapel Hill, 1908 (“Studies in 
Philology,” Vol. ITI). 


170 American Literature 


from the imitators of his poetry, the English, 
the Germans, and the French have been pupils 
of the story-teller Poe and have won, as disci- 
ples of the master, resounding fame in both hem- 
ispheres. The Americans Fitz-James O’Brien 
and Ambrose Bierce, the Englishman, Rudyard 
Kipling—to name the master of the species in 
England—the Frenchman Guy de Maupassant, 
learned the technique of the short story from 
him. O'Brien's tale, > What Was: 400 ap- 
proached its model very closely, at least so far 
as the technique is concerned. Ambrose Bierce 
(born 1842) in his collection of tales, “In the 
Midst of Life,” has pictured the last moments 
of the dying with fearfully convincing imagina- 
tive force. Jules Verne, Curd Laszwitz, and 
H. G. Wells have imitated the pseudo-scientific 
cosmic romances; Robert Louis Stevenson has 
spun the thread of Captain Kidd’s hidden treas- 
ure further; and Conan Doyle’s copy of Poe’s 
Dupin, the now ubiquitous detective genius 
Sherlock Holmes, has crowded his prototype 
out of the memory of the world. 

3. HAWTHORNE.—Nathaniel Hawthorne 
(1804-1864) was descended from one of the old- 
est Puritan families in New England and passed 
his youth in his native town, Salem, amid ultra- 


The Psychological Tale 17] 


orthodox surroundings.* He was but four 
years old when his father, a sea captain, died 
in a foreign land. His training by his mother, 
a high-minded and keenly sensitive woman, was 
not conducive to the development of the sturdier 
fibres in her son. The boy was quiet, self- 
contained, and muchalone. After completing his 
university studies (1825) he returned home and 
lived there for twelve years, lost in dreams and 
in his literary endeavors. From the outside 
world he held aloof. He made a veritable cult 
of his seclusion; even his meals he ate alone in 
his room. He would walk out only after dark- 
ness had set in. In his ‘‘Note-Books”’ we find 
this entry: 

“And now I begin to understand why I 
was imprisoned so many years in this lonely 
chamber, and why I could never break through 
the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner 
made my escape into the world, I should have 
grown hard and rough . .._. by rude en- 
counters with the multitude. But living in 
solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still 
kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of 
my heart.”’ 


*He has described Salem fm the introduction to the “The Scar- 
let Letter.”’ 


172 American Literature 


This dream-life came to an end when he fell 
in love and contemplated marriage. He ob- 
tained a position in the Boston custom-house. 
When after two years another political party 
came to the helm he, more Americano, lost his 
place, but married, nevertheless (1842), and 
passed four ideally happy years in Concord, in 
closest proximity to the Transcendentalists. 
Again there was a change in political manage- 
ment, and Hawthorne became surveyor of 
customs at Salem (1846). There he wrote 
“The Scarlet Letter.” In 1853 a friend of his 
youth who had attained great political power 
procured him the post of consul at Liverpool, 
where he remained four years. He also enjoyed 
the privilege of a well-nigh two years’ sojourn 
in France and Italy. Then he returned to his 
native land and died. 

The germ of every tale of Hawthorne’s is a 
psychological problem. Action, local color, de- 
tails—all these occupy a secondary place. His 
‘“Note-Books”’ give us unequivocal evidence of 
this. ‘A change from a gay young girl to an 
old woman; the melancholy events, the effects 
of which have clustered around her character, 
and gradually imbued it with their influence, 
till she becomes a lover of sick chambers, taking 


The Psychological Tale 173 


pleasure in receiving dying breaths and laying 
out the dead; also having her mind full of funeral 
reminiscences, and possessing more acquaint- 
ances beneath the burial turf than above it.’’* 
This idea was carried out in ‘Edward Fane’s 
Rosebud.” 

“To represent the process by which sober 
truth gradually strips off all the beautiful dra- 
peries with which imagination has enveloped a 
beloved object, till from an angel she turns out 
to be a merely ordinary woman.” This like- 
wise was carried out, at least in part, in Mrs. 
Bullfrog. 

That Hawthorne’s delight in psychological 
studies 1s, in its ultimate essence, of a Puritanic- 
spiritualist nature and not the _ instinctive 
gratification of a bent for analysis, is shown, in 
the first place, by the fact that the Calvinist 
bogy of guilt and sin furnishes him with his most 
powerful motifs; furthermore, by the circum- 
stance that in his ‘‘Note-Books” he just as 
frequently sketches plots for parables and alle- 
gories—naturally with a decidedly didactic 
tendency. “A snake taken into a man’s stom- 
ach and nourished there from fifteen years to 


*“American Note-Books,”’ I, 9. 
tIbid., p. 11. 


174 American Literature 


thirty-five, tormenting him most horribly. A 
type of envy or some other evil passion.” ‘Two 
lovers to plan the building of a pleasure house 
on a certain spot of ground, but various seem- 
ing accidents prevent it. Once they find a 
group of miserable children there; once it is the 
scene where crime is plotted; at last the dead 
body of one of the lovers or of a dear friend 1s 
fome: (here) 5 Phe ioral, ‘ 
“To describe a boyish combat with snowballs, 
and the victorious leader to have a statue of 
snow erected to him. A-satire on ambition and 
fame. is: 

Of course it is difficult to say how much of 
this inclination to allegory is a Puritan inheri- 
tance, how much literary borrowing; for we 
know from Hawthorne’s biography as well as 
from his “‘ Note-Books”’ that not only Bunyan’s 
“ Pilgrim’s Progress,” but also Spenser’s “‘ Faerie 
Queene,” had made a most profound impression 
upon him. 

But literary influence is far less noticeable in 
Hawthorne than in Poe. Anton Schénbach 
justly rejects the view expressed by Poe that 
Tieck served Hawthorne as a model. On the 
other hand, it may be assumed with a certain 
degree of confidence that he is indebted to Bal- 





The Psychological Tale i7s 


zac, at least for growth in the direction which 
he had marked out for himself. 

Hawthorne’s masterpiece is the historical tale, 
“The Scarlet Letter,” a story of three human 
beings with scarcely any outward incident. A 
young and beautiful woman, full of life, is put 
into the pillory in the Puritan town of Salem, 
and condemned to wear the letter A (signifying 
adulteress) on her breast in scarlet embroidery 
visible to all; for she has given birth to a girl, 
although her husband, the aged Dr. Prynne, 
had not been heard of for years. Her punish- 
ment proves all the heavier since, in spite of all 
the pressure that is brought to bear on her, she 
refuses to reveal the name of her partner in 
guilt. She is expelled from the community of 
the pious and moves into a cottage remote from 
the town, away by the sea, where she supports 
herself and her singularly beautiful and uncom- 
monly capricious child with handiwork; she is a 
mistress in the art of the needle. Gradually 
people accustom themselves to her guilt and 
the flaming sign upon her breast; for Hester 
Prynne is quiet and inoffensive, but ever ready 
to help where she is needed in want and sick- 
ness. 

On the very day that she stood in the pillory 


176 American Literature 


there appeared in the settlement a little old 
man, Roger Chillingworth, who had long lived 
among the savages and learned from them the 
healing powers of plants. He is very welcome 
to the Puritans. ‘The old man strives to win 
the friendship of Dimmesdale, the minister, who, 
though a young man, is universally rever- 
enced for his piety and learning. Dimmesdale 
at first repels the advances of the strange and 
uncanny-looking physician, but finally succumbs 
to his persistence and his more powerful will. 
They move into the same house, ostensibly 
because the minister, who daily grows paler and 
thinner, 1s in need of a watchful doctor in his 
immediate neighborhood. Thus the old man is 
enabled not only to observe Dimmesdale at all 
hours of the day and night, but to make him 
talk, even against his will. The old man is, 
of course, the husband of the adulteress, and his 
revenge consists in his gloating daily and hourly 
over the anguish of Hester, who at once rec- 
ognized him, and the tortured conscience of the 
noble-minded minister. Dimmesdale atones for 
his passion like a saint, and is wrecked by 
his sin. Hester, however, triumphs over the 
vindictiveness of her tormentor by continuing 
to an advanced old age her labors of love 


The Psychological Tale 77 


among her fellow-creatures; enjoying well- 
earned respect and honor in spite of the scarlet 
letter. 

Thus there is scarcely any action, nothing 
but inward experience. Nevertheless, “The 
Scarlet Letter” is the greatest novel, artistically, 
in American literature. This is due, above all, 
to the sure touch with which the best means 
are employed to produce the intended effect. 
Hawthorne sees his characters as if he had them 
bodily before him, and his delineation is so 
careful, so true to life, that he compels us to see 
them with his eyes. Not a single trait is to be 
found that is not in keeping with the character, 
not a single word that we feel to be superfluous. 
Allis as if cast in bronze. : 

For Americans and Englishmen the work has 
besides its purely poetic value still another 
significance, in that it represents the essence of 
the Puritan spirit, without any historical les- 
sons, without a mass of external details. The 
entire atmosphere ts filled with Calvinistic views, 
without the author thinking it necessary so 
much as once to explain those views, as other 
delineators of that time have done, Harriet 
Beecher Stowe for example. The German reader 
does not bring this historic interest to bear upon 


178 American Literature 


thenovel; theeffect upon himis more unalloyed 
that of a work of art pure and simple. 
Hawthorne’s second novel dealing with Puri- 
tan surroundings, “The House of the Seven 
Gables,” has found more readers but fewer 





admirers. The gloom of the old house and its 
inmates is illuminated by the rosy youth of the 
maiden from the country, and in spite of the 
sad figures of the old judge and the anemic 
Hepzibah with her inflexible patrician pride, 
the sunshine of a redeeming humor hovers over 
the whole. 

The other novels of Hawthorne are as good 
as forgotten to-day, even in America. 

4. JAMES AND HOWELLS.—It is a long way 
from Poe and Hawthorne to James and Howells, 
and it is customary, in histories of American 
literature, to keep the two pairs pretty carefully — 
apart by broad streams flowing between. And 
yet, psychologically considered, they belong 
together. What binds them together is not 
only the combination of the study of the soul 
with realism, but also literary tradition. 

Henry James (born 1843), who years ago 
wrote, not very sympathetically, of the life and 
work of Hawthorne, would perhaps object to 
the honor of being classed as a fellow-artist with 





The Psychological ‘Tale 179 


Poe and Hawthorne; the European, the man of 
the world, and the humorist in him would pro- 
test against a spiritual kinship with the New 
England recluse and moralist Hawthorne. And 
yet they belong together, for both cultivated 
the same species of art—the psychological novel. 
In the choice of matter alone do they differ en- 
a natural result of the different circum- 





tirely 
stances of their lives. Henry James left his 
native town, New York, in his twelfth year, 
and returned to America only for the short 
period of his university studies, and after that 
always merely as a fleeting guest. He feels 
at ease in France and Italy; in England he is per- 
fectly at home. ‘This explains why he prefers 
to select his men and women among travellers, 
among the most restless people of our time, who, 
a fructifying stream of gold, annually pour over 
Europe from the western shores of the Atlantic. 
His heroes and heroines are almost always of the 
New World, but we make their acquaintance in 
Switzerland (Daisy Miller), in England (Isabel 
Archer), in Italy, in France (The Americans)— 
everywhere, only not in their own home. 

James began as a disciple and imitator of 
Hawthorne. Tales like ““The Madonna of the 


Future’? and “A Passionate Pilgrim” are psy- 


180 American Literature 


‘chological problems with an allegorical core, 
like most of Hawthorne’s “‘Twice-Told Tales.”’ 
‘But James swiftly ends his apprenticeship, and 
‘soon discovers his own art. 
~ Henry James, son and grandson of gentlemen 
and scholars, is an embodied protest against the 
vulgar misuse of language which celebrates its 
triumphsin the rhetoric characteristic of a certain 
portion of the trans-Atlantic press. 
Polysyllabic words of Latin origin, prolixity, 
circumlocution, crass exaggeration, sensation- 
alism, constant striving for crude effects, hurrah- 
patriotism, fawning upon the mob, a mania for 
quotation, predilection for the commonplace of 
the school of Martin Tupper, false sentimental- 
ity, complacent  philistinism—James abhors 
these abominations with all his soul. And in 
his hatred of this crudity and flatness of pro- 
vincial authorship, his ideal of art is to keep 
aloof as far as possible not only from the com- 
mon, but also from the popular, from the 
obvious, and likewise from the readily compre- 
hensible. He has such contempt for the piling 
up of incidents that, where possible, he elimi- 
nates action altogether. Psychological analysis 
and mastery of the art of words are to him the 
only legitimate resources of the writer of fiction. 


The Psychological Tale 181 


William Dean Howells, too (born 1837), who 
started out with journalistic writing and be- 
trays his practice as a reporter in many of his 
novels, sedulously avoids any unusual incidents 
and seeks to gain the reader’s interest exclu- 
sively by character study and style. 

The distinguishing characteristic of James and 
Howells is “‘finesse.”’ The reader to whom their 
figures would appeal must be prepared to solve 
psychological problems, enigmas of character. 
They themselves only furnish the material in 
oe cercain way. They ‘exhibit a manor a 
woman in daily life—show us how they eat and 
drink, pay visits and talk, how they go about 
their work and pass their leisure hours. In the 
midst of these everyday occurrences a fateful 
situation is evolved—what he or she will do in 
that juncture signifies a decision affecting their 
whole future: how will he, how will she, decide? 
In the case of every other story-teller one can 
predict with a great degree of probability what 
the decision will be—with James never, rarely 
with Howells. The women, particularly, are 
inscrutable to the average intelligence. The 
story “‘Daisy Miller,’ by James—which, by the 
way, is the most perfect work of his pen and a 
prime illustration of the nature of his art—and 


182 American Literature 


“Miss Bellard’s Inspiration,’ by Howells, are 
excellent examples of how these writers main- 
tain to the end the reader’s tense interest in 
their psychological riddles. 

“Daisy Miller,” regarded as a portrait—this 
is admitted by all of James’s critics, even those 
adversely inclined—is unsurpassed in American 
literature. The young American girl, who, with- 
out culture, almost without education, under- 
stands the art of dressing like a lady of the best 
society, and who accepts the homage of the male 
world like a born princess, as a fitting tribute; 
who allows herself all sorts of liberties without 
ever compromising herself, who defies and _tor- 
ments the man she loves because his spiritual 
superiority oppresses her—this study of a 
woman really comprehends all the psychological 
art that has made James famous; only the colors 
are fresher, the lines more vigorous, the whole a 
youthful inspiration. 

Undiscerning critics, to whom the suggestive 
art of this novelist does not appeal, have found 
Daisy Miuller’s attitude toward her admirers 
enigmatical, her early death in Rome forced, 
the dénouement unsatisfactory. Henry James 
has no doubt smilingly thought to himself re- 
garding such censors: ‘‘My dear sir, I did not 


The Psychological ‘Tale 183 


write this story for you; you are a reader after 
Martin Tupper’s and Marte Corelli’s ownheart.”’ 

Of the longer stories the three-volume novel 
entitled “The Portrait of a Lady,” in spite of 
the thread of the story being, on the whole, too 
long drawn-out, contains a number of characters 
that are simply unforgettable; above all, the 
“lady” herself, Isabel Archer, again an Ameri- 
can, but this time (in contrast with Daisy Miller) 
an over-refined spirit that is almost wrecked by 
her over-refinement. 

The literary ideal of this group is expressed 
by Howells in few words: 

“T wonder,” says a Bostonian who is fasci- 
nated by Quebec’s picturesque charms, “‘Quebec 
isn’t infested by artists the whole summer long. 
They go about hungrily picking up bits of the 
picturesque along our shores and country roads 
when they might exchange their famine for a 
feast by coming here.” 

‘“‘T suppose,” replies the heroine of the story, 
“there’sa pleasurein finding out the small graces 
and beauties of the poverty-stricken subjects, 
that they wouldn’t have in better ones, isn’t 
there? At any rate, if I were to write a story, 
I should want to take the slightest sort of plot, 
and lay the scene in the dullest kind of place, 


184 American Literature 


and then bring out all their possibilities. I'll 
tell you a book after my own heart: ‘ Details’— 
just the history of a weekin the life of some young 
people who happen together in an old New 
England country house; nothing extraordinary, 
little, everyday things told so exquisitely, and 
all fading naturally away without any particular 
result, only the full meaning of everything 
brought out.’’* 

It often results from this self-conscious art 
that the artist, in his effort not to be dominated 
by matter, commits the mistake of renouncing 
matter altogether—of wishing to make bricks 
with neither loam nor straw. 


*“ A Chance Acquaintance,” Boston, 1874, p. 164. 


CHAPPER Vit 
THE HUMORISTS 


1. GENERAL.—No species of literature is repre- 
sented in America with such richness, variety, 
completeness, and brilliancy as that shown in its 
humor. Humorists of genius and esprit, who 
turn to this subtlest form of art, like Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, and are satisfied if their whim- 
sical words elicit a smile; popular humorists, 
who pre-suppose in their readers no more than 
a little knowledge of human nature, and pro- 
voke bursts of laughter, like Mark Twain; 
humorists who appeal to the boisterousness 
latent in us all, like Artemus Ward, and tickle 
us with the rudest devices of a clown, so that we 
roar—all these are found in greater abundance 
in American literature than in that of any other 
country. 

2. REFINED HUMOR.—Refined humor finds 
its highest literary expression in “elegant” 
poetry, in the so-called vers de société, or, 
as the Americans prefer to call it, familiar 

185 


186 American Literature 


verse,* which occupies about the same place in 
poetry that still-life or genre pictures do in 
painting. The master of this species, as Locker- 
Lampson declares, is Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
and as examples of this kind we may desig- 
nate his exquisite poems Contentment, To an 
Insect, The Last Leaf, On Lending a Punch- 
Bowl, Bill and Joe, Dorothy Q.T 

John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) leans too 
much upon the English poet Praedf{, but sur- 
passes his prototype through his American 
vivacity; The Mourner dla Mode, The Heart and 
the Liver, Little Jerry, My Familiar, Early Ris- 
ing, The Pedagogue, are most deserving of men- 
tion. 

To Henry Cuyler Bunner (1855-1896), who ° 
conducted Puck for a number of years, we are in- 
debted—besides his lively prose sketches which 
link him with the short-story writers—for a num- 
ber of vers de société: The Way to Arcady, Can- 
dor, The Chaperon, Forfeits, Poetry and the Poet. 


*The character of this peculiar species, little regarded in Ger- 
man literary criticism, is discussed at length by Frederick Locker- 
Lampson in the introduction to his anthology Lyra Elegantiarum 
(Kellner, Die Englische Literatur im Zeitalter der Konigin 
Viktoria, p. 171), and by Brander Matthews, “American Familiar 
Verse,” p. 1-28. 

+On Oliver Wendell Holmes, see above 1, Chap. 5. 

tKellner, loc. cit. p. 163. 


The Humorists 187 


Out of the great mass of poets who, after 
Holmes, cultivated this species, Eugene Field 
(1850-1895) towers head and shoulders above 
the rest; a journalist, a newspaper poet, so to 
speak, such as, in point of versatility, richness, 
and individuality no country but America 
has thus far produced. The whole phenom- 
enon is so new in literature, so characteris- 
tically American, that it is worth while to 
analyze it. 

Field brought to his calling a classical edu- 
cation, gained in high school and university. 
He served an apprenticeship upon little pro- 
vincial papers, until the editor of the Daily 
News of Chicago offered him a position on the 
editorial staff, where he was to write humorous 
verse as a “‘specialty.”’ The poems attained a 
rare popularity and were repeatedly published 
in book form: “‘Culture’s Garland” (1887), “A 
Little Book of Western Verse” (1889), “With 
Trumpet and Drum”’ (1892), ‘““Second Book of 
Verse” (1893), ‘“Echoes from a Sabine Farm” 
(1893), and others.* 

He can accommodate himself to anything, no 


*In “The Poems of Eugene Field,’ complete edition, Charles 
Scribner’s Sons, 1g11, the best poems are collected in convenient 
form. 


188 American Literature 


species is impossible to him. He is bound by 
only one trammel: the poem must not transcend 
the limits of a feuilleton. We may not, there- 
fore, look for an epic poem from his pen—other- 
wise every poetical species is represented by 
him. He has little lyrics that almost sing them- 
selves, which remind one of Burns; drinking 
songs; verses of his married life, springing from 
genuine, deep emotion; ballads; parodies; ele- 
gant vers de société; masterly translations of 
Horatian odes, and—hymns. 

Everywhere the same ease and smoothness, 
everywhere an ordinary vocabulary, at most 
the exploiting of an antique orthography and of 
a few familiar archaisms. All men of consider- 
able talent, indeed, are at home in the older 
English literature; some, like Eugene Field, 
imitate without difficulty the ballads of the 
fourteenth century.* The astonishing thing 
about it 1s that such literary delicacies are 
understood and appreciated by the public at 
large. 

Eugene Field is the genuine humorist by grace 
of God. He is endowed with the rare gift of 


*Cf. Madge the Hoyden, A Proper Trewe Idyll of Camelot (the 
last verse alone contains the satirical fling at Chicago), The Ballad 


of the Taylor Pup. 


The Humorists 189 


making merry over himself, of bestowing a com- 
passionate smile upon his own foibles and mis- 
haps, and thus robbing them of all the unloveli- 
ness of everyday things. He was fond of a good 
glass of wine, perhaps even a glass too much; 
and he was not averse to a dainty dish, either, 
which compelled him later to do penance at 
Karlsbad. But how cheerful sounds the psalm 
of penance from the Bohemian Mecca, with the 
refrain: 


When you were weighing twenty stone and 
I weighed ten stone three— 


or the merry poem of the bottle of wine and the 
tender roast chicken, or the still merrier one of 
the “‘pneumogastric nerve,” or the hymn of the 
‘delicious roast beef.” 

He is a bibliomaniac. He dotes, above all, 
upon old pigskin-covered tomes of all ages and 
climes. They crowd out from his heart not only 
his friends but.also the young ladies. Books are 
like women—pleasing to the eye, they incite to 
purchase, and they are of every size and kind. 
He didn’t care for a folio, only a middle-sized, 
bonnie octavo, full of verse and prose, with an 
occasional happy idea, with variety for body 
and soul. 


190 American Literature 


Revolt against a style that servilely follows 
English models, a style that anxiously avoids 
any native individuality, set in at an early stage 
of American literature; the bold introduction of 
dialect into literature (by Lowell and Holmes) 
is the most marked expression of that emanci- 
pation. 

But in the last quarter of the nineteenth 
century the intimate intercourse between the 
wealthy classes of England and America resulted 
in America’s once more falling under the yoke 
of English society. Against this Eugene Field 
stood on his guard, in his humorous way, by de- 
fending the old shibboleth of American indi- 
viduality, ‘‘I guess,” against the English idiom, 
“1 fancy.” 

The old Puritan trust in God, which in its 
ultimate analysis is nothing but a trust in one’s 
own strength, and the Titanic defiance which 
conquers Fate because it looks upon the worst, 
upon Death, with fearless eyes, is met with, 
even among the most worldly of American poets 
—-the newspaper poets. Verses like the short 
poem of two stanzas, Contentment, by Eugene 
Field, show that the chase after the dollar, the 
corruption of cities, the shortcomings in gov- 
ernmental administration, the irresponsibility 


The Humorists IgI 


of those in authority, are transitory, because 
superficial, phenomena: the marrow of the “‘na- 
tion,’ as the United States terms itself by pref- 
erence, is of an indestructible Puritan soundness. 

Eugene Field’s dialect poems of the West re- 
mind one by their rhythm, and their diction 
in general, of Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. 
Which of the two has the priority? 

A former gold-seeker revels in remembrance 
of the days “‘When the money flowed like lik- 
ker, and the folks wuz good and true.” 

The children’s poems lack the originality, the 
freshness, of a natural growth; most of them 
give evidence of effort, of having been made at 
the desk. In the Armenian, the Sicilian, the 
Jewish cradle songs, we see the poet supporting 
his head on his left arm and cudgeling his brains. 
I do not think it is going too wide of the mark 
to assume that Robert Louis Stevenson’s child 
verses incited the American to follow his exam- 
ple. 

Of wit there is almost none, and hardly any 
playing upon words; but the most refreshing and 
delicate humor, whose geniality is not a whit 
lessened by the admixture of a grain of harmless 
irony. 

Darts of satire we occasionally find, but they 


192 American Literature 


are never very sharply pointed, never poisoned. 
The sally against Longfellow in the poem, Peter 
V ogel, is an illustration: 


This is the legend of old, told in the tumtitty metre 

Which the great poets prefer, being less labor than 
rhyming 

(My first attempts at the same, my last attempt, too, 
I reckon). 


Humor of the most delightful sort is mani- 
fested in tales like “‘ Marjorie Daw,” by Aldrich; 
‘*Pomona’s Novel,” ‘““The House of Martha,” 
by Stockton; “* “The Pursuit: of the Piano,” by 
Howells. A conceit, a whim, a mood ts carried 
out to its utmost conclusion, regardless of real- 
ity and probability—this produces capriccios 
of the most airy, the merriest, most innocent na- 
ture. The art of this species of humor consists 
primarily in lulling us gently into a dreamy 
state, in consigning the laws of gravity to obliv- 
ion; if the humorist has brought us to this 
point, it is easy for him to carry us along in his 
excursions into the realms of the fantastic. 

“The House of Martha,” by Stockton, may 
be taken as an example. The narrator—it 1s 
noteworthy that this type of humor prefers the 
use of the first person—has spent a whole year 





The Humorists 193 


in Europe. His travels in England, France, 
Italy, were experiences which produced a most 
enduring effect. When he returns to his Ameri- 
can nest and begins to speak of his impressions, 
people run away from him or interrupt him with 
talk about their local trivialities. The traveller 
thus makes the astounding discovery that the 
ears of the modern man are not intended for 
hearing, but serve rather as spies and watchers 
of the tongue, to descry a pause in the talk of 
others: presto! the tongue leaps into the breach 
and makes itself mistress of the situation. 
“Modern conversation has degenerated into the 
Italian game of moccaletti, in which every one 
endeavors to blow out the candles of the others, 
and keep his own alight.”” What resource is left 
to the traveller under such circumstances but to 
hire a listener? After a number of futile at- 
tempts he procures the right man and Passes 
most enjoyable hours with him. 

That is the introduction; the humorist has 
expended the greatest care upon it, for it is deci- 
sive of the fate of his book. The heavy, refrac- 
tory reader, who will not allow the suggestion 
of a joke, lays the book down after the first few 
Pages; spirits of a lighter calibre, on the con- 
trary, have been adequately hypnotized by the 


194 American Literature 


introduction; nothing on the part of this Euro- 
pean traveller who hires a listener can anylonger 
astonish them. ‘The love story which now fol- 
lows between the amiable visionary and his 
amanuensis 1s no longer a struggle against prob- 
ability and reason, but a charming extrava- 
ganza. 

The inoffensive presentation, too, of the 
foreign, semi-Americanized element belongs to 
this sort of subtle humor. The model of this 
species was furnished by Charles Godfrey Le- 
land (1824-1903)—who, like Bayard Taylor, 
had lived a great deal abroad and had the keen- 
est appreciation of German literature*—in the 
‘Hans Breitmann’s Ballads.” 

The poems commemorate Hans Breitmann and 
his heroic deeds in all situations of life, as peace- 
ful citizen, as patriotic warrior, as father of the 
Fatherland. The heroic poems are extremely 
popular in America and England. The poet 
first introduces his hero to us when, as a loyal 
adopted son of the North American Republic, 
he goes to battle against the rebellious Southern 
States. Since the battles of 1848 his sword has 
been rusting; now he girds up his loins, mounts a 
charger, and rides at the head of a brave band 


*He made Heine and Victor Scheffel familiar in America. 





The Humorists 195 


of compatriots to meet the foe. Forthwith he 
encounters a cavalry detachment from Texas, 
whose leader, a young German, challenges him 
to combat. After a genuinely epic exchange of 
scornful speeches in the style of the Old German 
poem of Hildebrand and Hadubrand, they en- 
gage in a terrible fight, in which the old man 
vanquishes the young one. He has lifted his 
arm for the fatal blow, when he suddenly 
changes his mind and asks his beaten opponent: 


Pelievst du in Moral Idees. If so I let you free. 


But no, the lad knows nothing, alas, about 
morality, for since the time when, still a boy, he 
lost his father Breitmann, he has received no 
instruction of any kind. Whereupon the old 
man: 


Und war dy fader Breitmann? Bist du sein kit und 
kin? 

Dann know dat ich der Breitmann, dein lieber vater 
bin. 


But in spite of all his joy, Hans Breitmann 
cannot refrain from a slight suspicion. When 
he left his wife he knew nothing of his paternal 
bliss! It is only when the meeting is celebrated 
over lager beer, and the lad quickly empties a 


196 American Literature 


barrel instead of a beaker, that the old man 
cries enthusiastically: 


Bei Gott dat settles all dis dings— 
I know du bist mein Sohn. 


Hans Breitmann distinguishes himself by brav- 
ery in the war on every occasion, and the reck- 
less daring, in particular, with which he captures 
a brewery garrisoned by five hundred rebels, is 
admired throughout the land; as a reward the 
hero, crowned with fame, is nominated by his 
compatriots as a member of Congress. The 
appeal to the voters is composed in conjunction 


with Dr. Emsig: Griibler, 
Who in Jena once studiert; 


It contains six great moral ideas. Old Griibler 
constructs them with artistic gradation, the last 
and best appropriately crowning the rhetorical- 
philosophical edifice: 


Die sechste greate Moral Idee: 
Since it very well is known 
Dat mind is de result of food, 
As der Moleschott has shown, 
Und as mind is de highest form of God, 
As in Fichte tut appear— 
He must always go mit de Barty 
Dat go for Lager-bier. 


The Humorists 197 


In consonance with these philosophical prin- 
ciples there is a big barrel in the polling-place; 
every voter gets 


Of allerbest Markgrafler Wein 
Dazu zwolf Glaser Bock. 


Breitmann keeps on continuously with his 
election speech, which is received with enthu- 
siasm and consists exclusively of two sentences: 


Zapfet aus! 
Schenket ein! 


The moral ideas assist Breitmann in obtain- 
ing an immense majority over his Anglo-Saxon 
rival; the victory is, of course, fittingly cele- 
brated over the lager beer, and the hero of the 
day is modest enough to recognize in his tri- 
umph the triumph of the German spirit, the 
superiority of the world-conquering intelligence 
of the Germans over that of the English. He 
demonstrates to his hearers the simple, yet thus 
far generally misunderstood, truth that America 
belongs by rights to the Germans, for the dis- 
coverer of the new world was by origin a Ger- 
man! 


198 American Literature 


For as his name was Colon 

It visibly tut shine 

Dat his elders are geboren been 
In Cologne an dem Rhein. 

Und Colonia war a Colonie, 
Daher es leicht bemerkbar ist, 
Dass Columbus in Amerika 

War der erste Colonist. 


And, above all, the world-redeeming German 
philosophy! No people can boast of philo- 
sophical systems so profound and unfathomable 
that their discoverers themselves do not com- 
prehend them; Germany alone can point to 
such heroes: 


As der Hegel sagt of his system 

Dat only one man knew 

Wat der teufel it meant; 

Und der Jean Paul Richter too, 

Who said: God knows I meant somedings 
When erst this buch I writ, 

But God only knows wat dat buch means now 
For I have forgotten it. 


A man who can boast of such countrymen 
naturally makes his way in politics, and if 
genuine merit continues to be appreciated in 
America in the future, then Hans Breitmann 
will some fine day become President. 


The Humorists 199 


3. THE HUMOR OF EXAGGERATION.— Lhe sec- 
ond sort of humor, which provokes us to hearty 
laughter—such as the humor of Washington Irv- 
ing in his “‘History of New York,” to cite the 
oldest example—and which is essentially based 
upon exaggeration, is likewise very abundantly 
represented in American literature. That ex- 
aggeration is the essence of a certain type of 
American humor is unhesitatingly admitted by 
the Americans themselves, and was recognized 
as far back as fifty years ago by Gladstone, to 
whom we are indebted for the following example 
of American exaggeration: A firm in America 
which plumed itself upon its enormous business, 
found that its expenses increased too rapidly, 
and decided, from considerations of economy, 
that it should use less ink for its business cor- 
respondence. A shareholder proposed that the 
dot on the “fi” beomitted. ‘The suggestion was 
followed, and at the close of the year the firm 
reported a net saving of a hundred thousand 
dollars. 

Exaggeration would not amuse were it not an 
ingredient of the American character; it is this 
circumstance that makes it available for the 
humorist’s purposes, for it supplies the spice of 
self-mockery. The following conceit in an Amer- 


200 American Literature 


ican newspaper made the rounds of the entire 
press: ‘‘Has it occurred to you, Mr. Chairman, 
that the cotton cloth that is annually manu- 
factured in South Carolina would make a bed- 
spread large enough to cover the whole surface of 
America and Europe, and that it would, besides, 
hang over the toes of Asiaf And, sir, if all the 
cattle that are annually raised in South Caro- 
lina were a single cow, she could feast upon the 
vegetation of the equator while her tail would 
strip the icicles from the North Pole. Her milk 
would furnish a whole ship’s load of butter and 
cheese, to be transported from Charleston to 
New York. If all the mules that we breed 
every year were a single mule, he could consume 
the entire annual production of corn of North 
Carolina at a single meal, and could pluck out 
the spot from the sun with his hind feet without 
shaking his flank or wagging his tail. If all 
the pigs that we raise annually were a single pig, 
it could dig the Panama Canal with three move- 
ments of its snout, and its grunting would be 
so loud that the cocoanuts would drop from the 
trees throughout Central America.”’ 

The chief representative of this species of 
humor in America is “Mark Twain’’—Samuel 
Langhorne Clemens—(1835-1910). Bornin the 


The Humorists 201 


village of Florida, Missouri, he was thrown upon 
his own resources at an early age, and earned his 
living first as a compositor, then upon a Missis- 
sippi steamer, until he discovered his literary 
gift. 

A light-hearted fellow, brimful of roguishness 
without a grain of malice, a merry-andrew who 
is ready every instant to conjure up something 
before his own and others’ eyes without, in do- 
ing so, ever making an approach to truth; a 
visionary and star-gazer who never loses sight 
of the earth under his feet; a vagabond and 
adventurer who remains a gentleman from the 
crown of his head to the sole of his foot, and, 
with the grandiose mien of a Walter Scott, re- 
tains his commercial honor unblemished—that 
isthe writer, Mark Twain, and the citizen, Samuel 
Langhorne Clemens, in one. We know enough 
of Mark Twain’s life to understand the author 
of “TomSawyer” and “‘ Huckleberry Finn’’; but 
even if nothing of the days of his childhood and 
youth had penetrated to the public, any literary 
novice could easily have inferred the author 
from his works. In this humorist truth and 
fiction are intimately blended. The sleepy 
little town on the Mississippi where Tom Sawyer 
performed his heroic feats is Florida, where 


202 American Literature 


Mark Twain was born, but, to the despair of his 
parents, not educated; the pious, kind-hearted 
Aunt Polly, who labors in vain to make a de- 
cent scholar of the harebrained truant, 1s his 
own mother, who never lost faith in her trouble- 
some child, even after his teacher and his own 
father had given him up. And more even than 
outward circumstances and happenings does 
Tom Sawyer reveal the inmost soul of the future 
globe-trotting bohemian, the ungovernable im- 
pulse for freedom, the yearning for distant 
scenes, the vague presentiment of a stirring 
future, the childish consciousness of superior 
power. How after the death of his father he, a 
lad of twelve, obtained employment with a 
newspaper, which he retained for three years, 
fetching water from the village pump, sweeping 
the office and delivering the papers; how after 
this strenuous apprenticeship he threw up the 
job and started out with twelve whole dollars 
in his pocket, to try his luck in New York; how, 
sobered and disappointed, he returned to the 
Mississippi, took charge of his education him- 
self, and really learned the business of river 
piloting; how, in the silence of the night, under 
the deep blue vault of heaven, he discovered his 
vocation, and the archaic seaman’s cry “‘ Mark 


The Humorists 203 


Twain!”’ (the leadsman’s phrase for two fathoms 
of water) suggested his nom-de-plume—all this 
he has himself related in the simple and, per- 
haps for that reason, the most impressive way. 
That he did not persevere long as a pilot on the 
Mississippi, but tried his hand at writing in the 
West; that he led a life of adventure as a gold- 
digger with Bret Harte—a congenial compan- 
ion, yet fundamentally different from himself— 
and after all sorts of frustrated hopes finally and 
definitively joined the writers’ guild; these 
things may be gleaned from his sketches. His 
happy marriage and beautiful family life the 
Viennese learned to know with their own eyes 
in the winter of 1898-9. 

For decades Mark Twain’s name was con- 
nected with the story of the celebrated Jumping 
Frog, asin England and America up to the pres- 
ent Schiller’sname calls up Die Rauber, as though 
“Wallenstein” and ‘‘ Wilhelm Tell” had never 
been written. But The Jumping Frog exhibits 
only one side of the humorist, the most promi- 
nent, the most obvious one, his consummate 
descriptive talent. A loafer in a certain gold- 
mining camp, who is an inveterate better, has 
trained a frog, as well as some other creatures, 
and offers to bet all comers that said frog can 


204 American Literature 


beat any other frog in the world at jumping. 
And he always wins. One day he happens to 
meet a newly arrived stranger and offers him 
the usual bet. The artless-looking stranger is 
willing, for he cannot, he says, discover any 
special jumping muscles in the celebrated frog. 
Now, while the owner of the jumping frog is 
away looking for an ordinary frog in the nearest 
swamp, the wily stranger pours a load of buck- 
shot into the jumping frog’s body and wins. 
By the time the infuriated trainer discovers the 
fraud, the cunning fellow has vanished. This 
is the whole point of the story through which 
Mark Twain introduced himself into literature, 
and through which he gained a foremost place 
in the throng of American humorists. Strange, 
is it not? Well, the fact is that it is vain to 
attempt to retell a story of Mark Twain’s, for 
he 1s not a wit, but ahumorist. As far as I know 
he never made a witticism, not even a pun; and 
puns, owing to the numerous significations of 
Ienglish words, naturally enter most commonly 
and readily into Anglo-Saxon humor; even 
Dickens, who never made a good witticism, 
succeeds in making very acceptable puns, and 
in James Payn they are as thick as raisins in a 
Christmas pudding. Mark Twain produces his 


The Humorists 205 


effects solely by his humor. Only a German 
should not for a moment think of trying to fit 
Jean Paul’s, Friedrich Schlegel’s, or Vischer’s 
definition of humor to this peculiar American 
product; even the comparatively simple qualt- 
ties demanded of humor in Lazarus’ Leben der 
Seele must not be looked for. If it had occurred 
to any one to bring the profound researches of 
those thinkers to bear upon the works of the 
American humorist, it would indeed have been 
a grateful return gift of the Germans to the old 
man, for it would have furnished him royal 
sport. 

“The spirit of humor,” says Lazarus, “sees it- 
self and its actual life remote from their idea, 
powerless to attain their ends and its intent, 
consequently subdued and crushed and often 
condemned to the despairing derision of self- 
contempt; and, on the other hand, uplifted and 
purified by the consciousness of possessing and 
dominating the idea (and the infinite) despite 
everything, and of presenting and living it, 
though in ever so imperfect a form, and of being 
one with it in its deepest essence, if only through 
the knowledge gained fram it and the painful 
sense of imperfection,”’ etc. 

Shall we actually try to apply this analysis 


206 American Literature 


of humor to the Jumping Frog, or to the scene 
where Tom Sawyer obtains the prize for Bible 
study? Let us first have the facts. The re- 
ward for reciting two verses perfectly consisted 
in a little blue slip, upon which was printed a 
passage from the Bible. Ten blue slips could 
be exchanged for a red one, ten red ones for a 
yellow one. For ten yellow ones the pupil re- 
ceived from the parson a small cheap-looking 
Bible which among brethren was worth about 
forty cents. Only the oldest and most sedate 
pupils had the persistence toaccumulate so many 
slips and obtain the ardently longed-for prize. 
The lazy rogue, Tom Sawyer, was ambitious of 
such a distinction, not, of course, for the sake 
of the shabby copy of the Bible, but on account 
of the splendor connected with the ceremony. 
But where to obtain the necessary slips? Now 
he had not gathered Bible verses in his brain, 
but precious objects in his pocket, such as 
licorice, fishing-hooks, marbles, and other treas- 
ures. These he traded off very skilfully to his 
honest schoolmates, and he succeeded in de- 
frauding them of so many slips that on the day 
of the distribution of prizes, to the astonishment 
of the parson, he claimed the reward for industry 
and perseverance; and owing to the presence 


The Humorists 207 


of the district judge he actually obtained it 
without opposition. Unfortunately, the dis- 
trict judge was too highly delighted with the 
recipient of the prize and was anxious to learn 
from him the names of the first two apostles. 
The parson’s heart sank into his boots, Tom 
Sawyer: grew redder and redder, but as the dis- 
trict judge would by no means desist, he burst 
out with “ David and Goliath.”’ 

Now has any one the courage to apply 
Lazarus’s theory of humor to these two little 
stories’ No; the very first element in Mark 
Twain’s humor is the human, the only too hu- 
man, delight in the weakness, perversity, folly, 
of a beloved fellow-creature. And the more 
directly we are made to realize that weakness, 
perversity, folly, the greater is our enjoyment. 
We decent, well-bred people do not wish harm to 
any fellow-creature, Heaven forbid! We should 
be quite horrified, cold shudders would run 
up and down our back, if the elegant gentleman 
who slipped on the slimy November pave- 
ment broke his leg; but if his brand-new stove- 
pipe lies in the gutter, and its owner turns it 
about in his finely gloved hands, we onlookers 
cannot suppress a smile. A smile, be it re- 
marked, most fleeting, lasting but an instant; 


208 American Literature. 


but in that instant we were unconscionable 
rogues, untamed rascals checked by no altru- 
istic sentiments. One dare not breathe this— 
but it is an inexpressible pleasure: for the space 
of an instant we felt freed from the chains which 
innumerable thousands of years of social inter- 
course have forged about our innate savagery. 
This is, of course, but one of the elements in 
the humor of our American; and it is free to 
every truly good man (for instance to one who 
cannot even so much as smile at the mishap of 
the elegant gentleman) to seek out in his jokes 
the metaphysical contradiction between the idea 
and the reality. But wherever he produces gross 
cffects by gross means it is unnecessary to look 
for deeper explanations. We are confirmed in 
this view if we notice that we are most stirred to 
laughter when the dupe tells the story in the 
first person, thus reaping scorn in addition to 
injury. Mark Twain is particularly addicted 
to this form, and happy in the use of it. All the 
far-famed stories of the watch that runs per- 
fectly for a hundred and fifty years, until it 
falls into the ungodly hands of the watchmaker; 
of the writer who is called in the midst of a pro- 
foundly erudite essay to have lightning-rods 
set up on his house; of the husband whose wife 


The Humorists 209 


has a dread of storms and children’s diseases; 
of the journalist who goes to Tennessee to im- 
prove his health—from the crudest horseplay 
to the subtlest, keen-edged satire, he has not dis- 
dained to flatter us with our superiority, and to 
exploit, in just sufficient measure, our capacity 
for taking pleasure in other people’s mischances. 
Mastery of the art of description is a matter of 
course in the case of a great humorist; and his 
most telling effects are grounded in the pleasure 
we derive from mimicry. Here Mark Twain is 
the king of humorists. In three sentences he 
projects a character outlined with perfect clear- 
ness. And what a gallery of paintings of con- 
temporary American life did he produce in the 
forty years of his activity as an author! All 
strata, all callings, all climes, all temperaments 
and destinies are represented in him. The 
pompous senator ts not spared, the poor nigger 
Jim not forgotten. 

This is the chief reason why to foreigners 
Mark Twain comes so much closer than do the 
more recent American humorists, who surpass 
him, perhaps, in keenness and wit; the reason 
why Germans in particular regard him almost as 
one of their own; I believe no English or Amer- 
ican writer of to-day has found as many trans- 


210 American Literature 


lators and publishers in Germany. Our Ameri- 
can, in his fine humanity, in his idealism, in his 
gentleness, is almost an old-fashioned gentle- 
man. Itisa pity that the Puritan spirit, which 
still prevailed in the home of Mark Twain’s 
parents, is dying out. True enough, it often pro- 
duced blind zealots, intolerable pedants. But 
where the Puritan shoot encountered the suit- 
able psychical disposition, we had a Lincoln, an 
Emerson, an Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Mark 
Twain. Mark Twain did not study his Bible 
versesin the Sunday-school, but he absorbed and 
carried with him into life the Biblical ideal of 
the children of one God, the faith in right and 
justice. Whether this ancient ideal, the growth 
of a distant soil, is, as our supermen tell us, an 
ignis fatuus, the near future will teach us; in 
countries of the Anglo-Saxon tongue it has, al- 
ways up to the present at any rate, proved a 
trustworthy pole-star. 

Sensitive natures have taken exception to 
Mark Twain’s grotesque exaggeration, and, on 
account of this characteristic, have set his humor 
down as of a low order. This judgment 1s 
based on a misunderstanding. Exaggeration 
is not an essential trait of his humor, even if it 
aids it in its broadest effects; but subjectively 


The Humorists 211 


it can not be dissociated from Mark ‘Twain’s 
whole art as a writer. His countryman, the 
physiologist, Oliver Wendell Holmes—far too 
little known among us—divides mankind some- 
where into microscopic and telescopic natures. 
Writers like Dickens and Mark Twain require 
in their lives, as in their presentations, enormous 
dimensions. Both always craved space, dis- 
tance, new lands; both passed half their lives 
in wanderings, and both indulged in boundless 
exaggeration. What is odd about it is that 
Dickens in his descriptions of travel in America 
covers the exaggeration of the Yankees with 
ridicule, not suspecting that by it the exuber- 
ance of the young giant stood revealed, just as 
was the case with himself. The younger writers 
of America no longer give occasion for such re- 
proach; on the other hand, their humor has be- 
come so measured, so fine spun, that even micro- 
scopic eyes are unable to discern it. 

4. THE HUMOR OF PUN AND SLANG.—The 
third and cheapest, but assuredly also the most 
effective species of American humor, employs 
the pun, slang, and perversions of language of 
every sort, in addition to exaggeration. An 
occasional use of the pun is met with among the 
finest humorists; Thomas Hood owed a great 


212 American Literature 


part of his effects to this unacquirable knack, 
and Oliver Wendell Holmes makes quite abun- 
dant use of it. But there are many well-known 
examples of American verse which present noth- 
ing but a play upon words, with no trace of 
inherent humor. The poem, 4 Coat Tale, by 
H. C. Dodge, one of the best-known humorists, 
is an example of this: 


Old Tommy Taylor, tailor and 
Retailer, doth retail 

Old army coats and coats-of-arms, 
And also coats of male. 


With coats of paint he paints his coats- 
Of-arms above his door; 

His motto ts, “I sew the tares, 
Sow all may rip the more.” 


He is an artist tailor, and 
His artist work, he’ll tell, 

Is getting pay from customers 
Until he custom well. 


Whene’er his sewing was a lot 
His owing was a little, 

And though ill fits he never got, 
He often got a fit ill. 


Of much the same sort 1s The Ahkoond of 
Swat, by George T. Lanigan, and many other 


The Humorists 213 


verses in the comic papers, Life and Puck, and 
in the New York Sun. 

Perversions of speech based upon analogy 
and the like are not rare. A few stanzas from 
Conjugal Conjugations, by A. W. Bellow, will 
illustrate this: 


Dear maid, let me speak 
What I never yet spoke: 
You have made my heart squeak, 
As it never yet squoke, 
And for sight of you both my eyes ache as they ne’er 
before oke. 


With your voice my ears ring, 
And a sweeter ne’er rung, 
Like a bird’s on the wing 
When at morn it has wung. 
And gladness to me it doth bring, such as never 
voice brung. 


My feelings I’d write 
But they cannot be wrote, 
And who can indite 
What was never indote! 
And my love I hasten to plight—the first that I 
plote. 


Another source of humor is the unrestrained 
language of the lower middle classes in the towns 
—slang. Oliver Wendell Holmes makes a 


214 American Literature 


moderate use of it; “the young fellow they cali 
John” in the “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” 
is very refreshing by the free bluntness of his 
speech. It 1s only the recent humorists who 
have elevated slang to the rank of an essential 
of their humor, as for instance George Ade in 
his widely read “‘ Fables in Slang” (Chicago and 
New York, 1902). A recasting into the lan- 
guage of the educated would cause the humorous 
aroma to evaporate. | 


Artemus Ward, whose real name was Charles 
F. Browne (1834-1867), combined in his humor- 
ous lectures punning, perversion of speech, and 
slang. The following sketch, describing a visit 
among the Mormons, met with the greatest 
success: 


BROTHER KIMBALL 1s a gay and festive cuss, 
of some seventy summers, or some ’er’s there about. 
He has one thousand head of cattle and a hundred 
head of wives. He says they are awful eaters. 

Mr. Kimball had a son, a lovely young man, who 
was married to ten interesting wives. But one day 
while he was absent from home these ten wives went 
out walking with a handsome young man, which so 
enraged Mr. Kimball’s son—which made Mr. Kim- 
ball’s son so jealous—that he shot himself with a 
horse-pistol. 

The doctor who attended him—a very scientific 
man—informed me that the bullet entered the par- 


The Humorists 215 


allelogram of his diaphragmatic thorax, superin- 
cluding hemorrhage in the outer cuticle of his basil- 
icon thaumaturgist. It killed him. I should have 
thought it would. 


(Soft Music) 


I hope this sad end will be a warning to all young 
wives who go out walking with handsome young men. 
Mr. Kimball’s son is now no more. He sleeps be- 
neath the cypress, the myrtle, and the willow. The 
music is a dirge by the eminent pianist for Mr. Kim- 
ball’s son. He died by request. 

I regret to say that efforts were made to make a 
Mormon of me while I was in Utah. 

It was leap-year when I was there, and seventeen 
young widows, the wives of a deceased Mormon, 
offered me their hearts and hands. I called on them 
one day, and, taking their soft white hands in mine, 
which made eighteen hands altogether, I found them 
in tears, and I said, “Why is this thus? What is the 
reason of this thusness?”’ 

They hove a sigh—seventeen sighs of different 
size. [hey said: 

“Oh, soon thou wilt be gonested away! 

I told them that when I got ready to leave a place 
I wentested. 

They said, “Doth not like us?”’ 

I said, “I doth—I doth.” 

I also said, “I hope your intentions are honorable, 
as I am a lone child, my parents being far—far 
AWAY .* 


+9 


216 American Literature 


Then they said, “Wilt not marry us?” 

I said, ‘‘Oh, no, it cannot was!” 

Again they asked me to marry them, and again | 
declined, when they cried, “Oh, cruel man! this 1s too 
much, Oh, too much!” 

I told them that it was on account of the muchness 


that I declined. 


Char LER ey itt 
TALES OF THE SOIL 


1. ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT.—Lhe art of de- 
picting everyday life, with its specific local 
color, was cultivated in Scotland with some 
success as early as the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century. In America the realistic por- 
trayal of provincial life and the use of dialect 
dates back to the beginnings of her imaginative 
literature; Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s “A 
New England Tale,” a story which is designated 
as the forerunner of the whole species, appeared 
in 1822. But as in England, where it required 
a master of the stamp of George Eliot to gain 
appreciation and popularity for this form of art, 
so in America it was not until the appearance 
of a creative writer of the abounding vigor, the 
sensitive temperament, and the varied experi- 
ence of Bret Harte, that the literature of pro- 
vincialism became an established fact. ‘‘The 
Luck of Roaring Camp”’ (1869), a bold piece of 
impressionist open-air painting of the life of the 
217 


218 American Literature 


California gold-seekers—a work of the most 
absolute directness, without perspective, almost 
without sifting of its material—marks the be- 
ginning not of American local-color literature 
in general, but of that relating to sections other 
than the Eastern States. For the student of 
comparative literature it is a particularly note- 
worthy fact that the pioneer of provincial 
realism, this very Bret Harte, was a poet of the 
hrst water, a littérateur of fastidiously delicate 
taste who really felt himself exiled, as it were, 
among the untamed children of nature in the 
California gold-diggings. He was delighted 
with the offer of a chair of modern literature 
(1870); he left America without regret when he 
was appointed consul at Krefeld (1878); and in 
London, which he chose as his permanent abode 
in 1885, he consorted with the best society. 
His novels and tales, whose substance is taken 
from the Sierras, were, with the exception of 
two, ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The 
Outcasts of Poker: Flat,” all written: fiom 
memory. 

Another pioneer of realistic local fiction was 
Edward Eggleston (1837-1902), whose “‘ Hoosier 
Schoolmaster” appeared in 1871. In this first 
effort Eggleston, who had made Taine’s theory 


Tales of the Soil 219 


of environment his own, describes his own ex- 
periences; in conscious contrast with the method 
of idealizing embellishment. It reminds the 
German reader of Pestalozzi’s narrative writ- 
ings, and still more of Jeremias Gotthelf. And 
now there follow in rapid succession the works 
of the great American masters of local fiction, 
almost every state being represented by a num- 
ber of story-tellers. 

But brief as is the span of time that separates 
us from Bret Harte, the development of this 
species of American art has been extraordinary 
—almost as remarkable as that of the society 
depicted. The writers of the seventies and 
eighties content themselves with rough out- 
lines; they give to happenings and descriptions 
the priority over psychological analysis. With 
Bret Harte color and mood, with Eggleston 
environment, are the most essential things; the 
style is as direct and simple as the human na- 
ture. The farther we get away from these 
beginnings, the finer do we find the lines, the 
more careful the psychology, the more dis- 
tinguished the style. George Washington Cable 
(born 1844) is already far removed from the 
style of Bret Harte and Eggleston; the whole 
distance between 1869 and the close of the cen- 


220 American Literature 


tury is to be seen in James Lane Allen (born 
1849) who must on that account be presented 
somewhat more fully. 

The work upon which his reputation chiefly 
rests is “The Choir Invisible,” which appeared 
in 1897. The title itself shows that a poet with 
the literary spirit is addressing fastidious tastes. 
“What does it suggest to a simple mind? As- 
suredly something ethereal, something perhaps 
from the other shore, spirits or angels. The 
book, however, does not concern itself in the 
slightest with the world from which “no traveller 
returns.” On the contrary it is a presentiment 
of the most stirring life imaginable, the heroic 
age of the pioneers of Kentucky. And the 
misleading title, a concession to the learned 
snobbery of our time, which acts as if it had 
read everything and forgotten nothing, is taken 
from a poem of George Eliot’s: 


O may I join the choir invisible 

Of those immortal dead who live again 

In minds made better by their presence: live 
In pulses stirred to generosity, 

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 

For miserable aims that end with self. 


The invisible choir of the title is the band of 
heroes whose names are not recorded by history, 


Tales of the Soil 221 


and yet who in their quiet way have made 
America the grandiose spectacle which it is to- 
Gay. A. listorical: novel, -then! “No butve 
little heroic epic in prose, a brief episode in the 
life of two noble beings, just as befits an epic, 
the romance of two strong natures who are too 
proud to steal their happiness, and not modern 
enough to relegate the ideas of mine and thine 
to the lumber room. ‘The single man and the 
married woman remain separated; that is the 
whole extent of their defeat. Otherwise they 
are victorious all along the line; victorious over 
wilderness and savages, over malice and stu- 
pidity, over temptation and their own hearts. 
The book exhales youth and strength. The 
story opens with a half-tempting, half-chilling 
day of early spring, and like a northern May, 
which promises all yet withholds all, does the 
whole book affect our spirit. 

The strongest side of the American writers 
of local fiction—in contrast with the great cos- 
mopolitan novelists of America like Howells 
and James—is their narrow horizon, their quite 
childlike, unsubdued nature; it gives them a 
spiritual kinship to the naive poets of the ancient 
world. Allen’s “Choir Invisible’? is not the 
first or the only work of this kind, but it is the 


222 American Literature 


finest; the strong heart of a poet finds expression 
init. We have, above all, the deep attachment 
to the soil, which envelops us like the murmur of 
the woods. There is in reality nothing special 
about the soil of Kentucky; neither glaciers nor 
geysers, neither canyons nor silver or gold. 
Only an undulating landscape with a splendid 
robe of rich verdure; that is all. But the eye of 
a poet rests lovingly upon this spot of ordinary 
earth, and behold, itis sanctified and transfigured 
for us. And indeed the characters of the story 
are as everyday as the soil. One almost hesi- 
tates to say what the vocation of the hero 1s. 
He is a schoolmaster, a young fellow, poor as 
Job, who has been thrown upon his own re- 
sources from childhood, and strives withal un- 
swervingly for high objects, as the flame 1s 
drawn upward: 

‘Sorely as I have struggled, I have yet to en- 
counter that common myth of weak men, an 
insurmountable barrier. ‘The imperfection of 
our lives—what is it but the imperfection of our 
planning and doing? Shattered ideals—what 
hand shatters them but one’s own? I declare 
to you,” says the schoolmaster to the woman 
kindred to him in spirit, “‘at this moment, stand- 
ing here in the clear light of my own past, that 


Tales of the Soil 223 
I firmly believe I shall be what I will, that I shall 


have what I want, and that I shall now go on 
rearing the structure of my life to the last de- 
tail, just as I have long planned it.”’ 

That is the genuine American spirit, of the 
stamp that made of a rail-splitter a president of 
the Republic. Our schoolmaster, too, climbs 
the rungs of the social ladder to the top; he is 
one of the invisible choir that unlocked the West 
of the vast American continent. 

Strong-willed, iron men and tender, adora- 
ble women—these characters give a peculiar 
stamp to James Lane Allen’s art. In him we 
should look in vain for those traits which are apt 
to be regarded, by persons who get their im- 
pressions from newspaper reading only, as 
typically American. What a pleasant surprise 
to find in this provincial the most delicate 
shades and finest nuances, maiden-like reserve, | 
almost courtly taste. One is struck already in 
“The Choir Invisible” with the austere reticence 
that characterizes all well-bred descendants of 
the Puritans; in the second masterpiece, discre- 
tion is carried to the very limits of possibility. 
The book is called ““A Kentucky Cardinal,” and 
the title is a conscious ambiguity, a playful mis- 
leading of the reader. For it is not a dignitary 


224 American Literature 


of the church that is meant, but a shy warbler 
of the family of the Fringillide, whom the 
Americans term the Virginia Cardinal on ac- 
count of its scarlet plumage; and this warbler 
is, of course, not the real subject of the idyl but 
its symbol and culminating point: like the falcon 
in the famous Italian tale, it brings the lovers 
together. And wherefore the necessity for 
such an unusual mediator? Because these 
American provincials use language to conceal 
their feelings. Man and woman revel in the 
pains and ecstasies of the unexpressed. They 
chat with each other in the most confidential 
spirit as long as they confine themselves to half 
words, to intimations and enigmas. If the man 
begins to speak in distinct language of the real 
feelings of his heart, she vanishes at once like a 
shadow. But she is, in spite of her superabun- 
dance of wit, a creature of warm blood and most 
captivating womanliness, a combination that 
has reached an ideal perfection in the American 
woman of the Southwest, if the literary artists 
of that section may be believed. They all lie 
prostrate at the feet of their ideal. Reverence 
for woman can no farther go. 

2. NORTH AND souTH.—l|he contrast between 
the stubborn-soiled North, settled by Puritanic 


Tales of the Soil 225 


provincials, and the luxuriant South, taken pos- 
session of by the Cavalier families, finds expres- 
sion not in history alone. In literature, too, the 
productions of New England are sharply dif- 
ferentiated from those of Virginia or Carolina. 
The story writers, Margaret Deland (born 1862) 
and Mary E. Wilkins (born 1862), give us a 
picture of the life, feelings, and thoughts of the 
North in their most intimate details. It is worth 
while to reproduce the picture in miniature. 

In the concerns of everyday life, in their 
dwellings, their eating and drinking, in social in- 
tercourse, in their beliefs and thoughts, in love 
and hate, the natives pictured in the tales of 
village life give the impression of fossils be- 
longing to a long-vanished past. 

The New England village is distinguished 
from the all-levelling plutocratic city primarily 
by its aristocracy of birth, its family pride. In 
the country back of New York and Boston an- 
cestors still count. The almighty dollar of the 
self-made man tells, but only in the second or 
third generation. The definition given of a 
gentleman there is rather pretentious. A gen- 
tleman should know the given name and the 
vocation of his male ancestors at least to the 
fifth generation; naturally, the vocation must 


226 American Literature 


be such that its mention in good society is not 
embarrassing. Among those ancestors one may 
have been a member of the Provincial Council 
of his Majesty, another a governor, a third 
a doctor of divinity, a fourth a member of 
Congress, if possible of the time of tasselled md- 
ing-boots. A gentleman should have family por- 
traits, books with the names of their one-time 
owners under the device ‘‘Hic liber est meus,” 
Hogarth’s engravings in the original edition, 
Pope’s works in fifteen volumes, family silver, 
and if possible a family ghost. Gentlemen with 
such a splendid equipment are naturally rare 
specimens, but the right sort of “family” has 
one or other of these distinctions blazoned upon 
its invisible coat-of-arms. The doctor of divin- 
ity is particularly highly prized as an ancestor; 
the clergyman stands even to-day at the head 
of the aristocracy of a village, and he likewise rep- 
resents the conservative principle. Dr. Howe, 
the minister of the sleepy village to which Mar- 
garet Deland’s “John Ward, Preacher”’ trans- 
ports us, is proud of the elegant tranquillity of 
the little community in which his father and 
grandfather passed their lives comfortably before 
him; when the commercial and industrial ele- 
ments contrive a plan to entice the railroad to 


Tales of the Soil 227 


the dead-and-alive village, he interposes with 
his aristocratic authority. The workmen had 
already cut into the greensward, the company 
had plunged into expenditures; but the “fami- 
lies’ do not feel any need of contact with new 
and doubtful elements. So the wounds are 
healed once more which pickaxes and spade 
had inflicted upon the ground, and pink clover 
exhales its fragrance where it had been planned 
to lay rails and destroy the idyl. 

Self-sufiiciency and isolation is another char- 
acteristic of the New England village: every 
village is a little entity complete in itself. Di- 
vision of labor is hardly known there even by 
name. Like their primitive Puritan ancestors, 
who cleared the virgin forest, drove out the 
redskins and the wild animals, and with the 
same hand knew how to handle the rifle, the 
carpenter's hammer, and the plow—and, in case 
of necessity, the needle—the village inhabitants 
of the New England of to-day are skilled in all 
kinds of manual work and are fond of it. All 
the needs of material civilization are supplied 
by a few hands; industrial improvements, the 
conveniences of modern invention, are proudly 
ignored. Barnabas Thayer, in ‘‘Pembroke,”’ 
plowsin the primitive fashion of his grandfather; 


228 American Literature 


the housewives bake in brick ovens; for clothes 
and linens the fundamental raw material only is 
bought; the women spin, weave, sew, knit; for 
such necessaries not a penny passes out of the 
house. The village has a merchant, for sugar 
and coffee are not produced in New England, 
but in this limited sphere of village commerce 
the oldest form of trade, exchange, still survives. 
Rebecca Thayer is in need of sugar for domestic 
use; hence she counts out two dozen eggs, and 
William Berry, the merchant, weighs two and a 
half pounds of sugar for her in return—exactly 
according to the current rate. 

At the same time a certain luxury is developed 
which does not accord well with the Puritan 
sobriety in other directions. The women dress 
in silks and fine furs, the minister’s daughter 
possesses a small fortune in laces. The dwell- 
ings are spacious and comfortable; a separate 
bedroom for each person is a matter of course 
with a people who entertain so great a respect 
for individuality and all its rights. The learned 
callings enjoy the highest esteem; for they, too, 
are represented in the village. Besides the 
doctor of divinity there is the doctor of medi- 
cine and the lawyer; and the three representa- 
tives of university culture—the lawyer, to be 


Tales of the Soil 229 


sure, has not always the benefit of a university 
education, and his professional knowledge, in 
England and America, is mostly of a routine 
character—live side by side on the most amica- 
ble terms. Mutual entertaining, whist parties, 
bring variety and a gentle excitement into the 
drowsy monotony; when the children grow up, 
they marry among themselves. Unhappy elec- 
tive difhculties with a tragic sequel are handed 
down like earthquakes and wars from genera- 
tion to generation. 

All foreigners and persons of alien religious 
belief are barbarians in the eyes of the autoch- 
thons of New England. The Irish Catholics, 
who form so large a fraction of the population 
of most of the great cities, and who by their 
spirit and activity have contributed so largely 
to the progress of the commerce and industry 
of their adopted country, are a socially insig- 
nificant element in the villages. Their creed 1s 
conceived by the Presbyterians and Methodists 
as something monstrous, unspeakable, hardly 
imaginable. “The Methodist preacher in Harold 
Frederic’s “Illumination,” Theron Ware, has 
occasionally seen an Irish servant and Irish 
bricklayers, but in his imagination, which is the 
imagination of his parents and his co-religionists, 


230 American Literature 


the Irish are to blame for the drunkenness, the 
vice, the crimes, the political corruption of the 
American cities, and he looks upon their “false, 
idolatrous religion” as the primal source of these 
noxious things. When this autochthon acci- 
dentally becomes a witness of how a dying Irish- 
man receives extreme unction from the hands of 
a Catholic priest, this one scene, which thrills 
his inmost soul, makes him skeptical of his past, 
of his faith, of himself. In reality the New 
England villages are by their religion far more 
closely related to the first half of the seventeenth 
than to the end of the nineteenth century. The 
inexorable Calvinist view of life which the first 
Puritans brought over with them to America 
in the A/ayflower has been maintained by the 
Presbyterians and Methodists in all its rigor 
to the present day, and the theory is carried out 
to its minutest practical consequences. ‘The 
word of the Bible, in its naked, sober significance, 
is the standard for faith and thought, for life 
and death. ‘Go to the Bible!”’ That is the 
first and last resource of the inhabitants of 
Ashurst, Pembroke, Tyre, Octavius, Lockhaven, 
or whatever else may be the names of the vil- 
lages of which Margaret Deland, Mary E. 
Wilkins, and Harold Frederic give us convincing, 


Tales of the Soil 231 


because concordant, pictures. The very names 
are reminders of the times of Habakkuk: Stand- 
fast-in-the-faith, Destroy-the-enemy. 

Men and women are no longer given such sig- 
nificantly picturesque names; the martial spirit 
no longer exists, nor 1s there any need of it. But 
of all the sources of name-giving which we meet 
with in England and in American cities, there is 
no trace in the New England village. History, 
fiction, kinship, the calendar, whim—the place 
of all these is taken by the Book of Books. ‘The 
firstborn is put into the arms of the happy 
mother—what should it be called? The young 
woman doubtless cherishes a secret wish, the 
name of her favorite hero would be infinitely 
pleasant to her; but the wish of the mother is 
not taken into account. Gotothe Bible! The 
hero of the village tale, therefore, is called 
Barnabas, Caleb, Cephas, Ephraim, Levi, Eras- 
tus, Silas; the women answer to such names as 
Deborah, Rebecca, Sarah. Richard, William, 
Charlotte, Rose, are modern exceptions in the 
Biblical company. 

Hell and damnation are there not abstract ar- 
ticles of faith, but ever-present, effective moral 
forces; as in our life propriety and the police. 
The drunkard who mercilessly maltreats wife 


tv 


32 American Literature 


and child, unashamed before himself and the 
world, trembles like an aspen leaf as soon as 
John Ward, the preacher, reminds him of hell. 
When, for the sake of his young wife, John omits 
the mention of hell and everlasting damnation 
from one of his Sunday sermons, he is over- 
whelmed with reproaches by the wife of that 
drunkard. Without the weekly reminder, Tom 
cannot stand up straight fora day. In Harold 
Frederic’s story, likewise, the new preacher gets 
a sound lecture at the hands of one of the elders. 
Our congregation, says the good man, treads 
the narrow path that leads to life in a gentle and 
humble spirit; there are some churches where 
the minister says nothing about hell and dam- 
nation, but we are people of the old stamp, we 
want to hear about hell, about fire and brim- 
stone, where the wicked burn for ever and ever. 
The pious have not many pleasures in the vil- 
lages of New England; woe to him who would 
try to rob them of their chief consolation, the 
eternal damnation of the ungodly! 

The English Sunday is regarded with shud- 
dering on the continent as a horrible example 
of Puritan self-torture; the absence of theatrical 
performances and concerts seems an incompre- 
hensible barbarism to the French and Germans. 


Tales of the Soil 233 


But what is the ennui of an English Sunday in 
comparison with the Sabbath of the American 
Presbyterians and Methodists? Divine service 
three times, with three sermons, interdiction of 
any reading which might in any way be termed 
amusing, stale bread, old milk—the cows are 
milked, but the pious do not allow anything to 
be brought into the house on Sunday—these 
are the joys that distinguish the Lord’s day from 
the work days. In former times this kind of 
Sunday was general throughout the land. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes recalls them with shuddering 
from his earliest childhood; and we believe him 
literally when he relates that the funereal coun- 
tenances exhibited by the reverend gentlemen on 
Sundays contributed not a little to render dis- 
tasteful to him the ministerial calling to which 
he had been destined by his father. This sort 
of Sunday quiet has by this time disappeared 
from the towns; in the villages, however, it has 
survived with all its terrors. Harold Frederic’s 
preacher gets no fresh milk on Sundays, and 
well-meaning people impress it upon his young 
wife that she must not again appear in church 
on Sunday with flowers in her hat. 

This inflexible orthodoxy is connected with 
the most prominent trait of the inhabitants of 


234 American Literature 


the New England village. They are hard and 
reserved tothe extreme—nearly all of themchar- 
acters without a trace of temperament or imagi- 
nation. The indomitable determination of the 
Puritans, which humbled and crushed kings 
and nations, which in the course of two centuries 
created in a wilderness of wood and plain a 
civilization which Europe required two thousand 
years to build, has survived as a heritage to the 
people of Pembroke and Tyre to the present 
day. If they undertake a thing they carry it 
out or die; if they have said a thing it stands, 
even if the persons or things for whose sake it 
was said demand a retraction. What has once 
become a matter of faith is not shaken by a 
thousand arguments; a conviction is not aban- 
doned even should it crush and destroy. The 
old martyr blood, which flowed in the days of 
Mary, Elizabeth, and Charles I., still runs in the 
veins of the descendants of the Puritans. Deb- 
orah Thayer drives her eldest son from the 
house because he leaves his afhanced on account 
of a quarrel with his future father-in-law; she 
does not like the girl, but she hates the injustice 
that is done her, and with a breaking heart 
casts off her firstborn because her conscience 
demands it. Her second son is sickly from his 


Tales of the Soil 235 


birth; he is somewhat humored, therefore, as 
the doctor has positively forbidden any sort of 
chastisement. Deborah, however, is embittered 
by the disobedience and stubbornness of the 
eldest son; and so, when the sickly younger son 
is also about to offer opposition to his mother’s 
will, she fetches a stick. She knows that she ts 
imperilling his life by corporal punishment, and 
he is now her only child; but it is better that he 
should be dead than wicked, better that his body 
suffer than his immortal soul. And the boy 
dies, almost under her hands. Martyrs to their 
Puritan loyalty to conviction are also the chief 
figures in Margaret Deland’s book, “‘John Ward, 
Preacher.’’ He adheres firmly to the orthodox 
creed and preaches hell and damnation in the 
Calvinist manner. Helen, his wife, is not to be 
won over to that barbaric belief—she leaves her 
home, therefore, and the lives of two choice 
spirits are ruined for nothing. 

3. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.—l|he distin- 
guishing characteristic of life in the Southern 
States was negro slavery, and it finds expres- 
sion, naturally, not in politics and history alone, 
but in literature as well. “The intercourse of the 
whites and blacks, the influence of the negroes up- 
on the feelings and thoughts of the Caucasians, 


236 American Literature 


have been depicted a thousand times—with or 
without a purpose; the classical work of that 
species was, and has remained to the present 
day, ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which appeared in 
1852. 

All historians, whether they belong to the 
victorious North, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, or 
to the vanquished South, agree in thinking that 
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a leading factor in 
bringing about the Civil War, which rent the 
Union from 1861 to 1865; that the abolition of 
slavery was in a great measure owing to that re- 
markable book. And yet to-day, if one must 
tell the truth, it 1s but slightly valued, not only 
in the outside world, but in the United States 
itself; and the new generation speaks of “‘Uncle 
Tom,” with the superior air of ignorant youth, 
as an ephemeral political production. 

The fact is that Harriet Beecher Stowe has in- 
sofar shared the fate of many authors who have 
become famous over night that posterity has 
sought to counterbalance the former blind over- 
estimate by exaggerated criticism, by petty 
hair-splitting; but she comes off far better than 
many of her fellow-sufferers, for her popularity 
has outlived her fame. Directly after its ap- 
pearance ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was sold by 


Tales of the Soil a 


hundreds of thousands, translated into all civil- 
ized tongues, presented in dramatic form on 
every stage. That honor has fallen to the share 
of other books as well. But while other celeb- 
rities of the day, of that and more recent times 
—nomina sunt odiosa—are by this time forgot- 
ten, the demand for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 
American circulating libraries continues almost 
unabated year after year. This perennial youth 
alone argues against the assertion that it 1s noth- 
ing but a sensational blood-and-thunder novel, 
devoid of all artistic objectivity, extravagant in 
its heaping up of atrocities, puerile in its crude 
contrasts of black and white, devils and angels, 
and marred by its thickly laid-on morality and 
its lengthysermons. Neither the former lauding 
to the skies nor the depreciation of to-day is 
deserved. 

Let it be clearly understood, in the first place, 
that Harriet Beecher Stowe was a born story- 
teller, like Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, like 
George Sand, like Clara Viebig. As to the meas- 
ure of her talent, there may be a difference of 
opinion; that her talent is essentially artistic, 
that the impulse toward the portrayal of char- 
acter was stronger in her than the inclination to 
instruct and edify, she has shown unmistakably 


238 American Literature 


in her later works, in the descriptions of the life 
of the Puritans in New England. There it is all 
character study, without the shadow of a pur- 
pose, and precisely there does she show her- 
self strongest and most self-confident. ‘‘Uncle 
‘T'om’s Cabin,” in spite of its forming the zenith 
of the authoress’s life, must in justice be esti- 
mated as what it was—the first literary attempt 
of a woman born, bred, almost grown old, in a 
clerical environment. Harriet was forty years 
old when her first work appeared in The National 
Era. If the novel contained no characters but 
Marie St. Claire and Ophelia we should recog- 
nize the hand of an inspired creative artist, for 
they are two consummate portraits. 

Less justified still than the reproach of di- 
dacticism is the assertion that in ‘Uncle Tom’s 
Cabin” Mrs. Stowe lowers the art of the novelist 
to the level of the preacher’s pulpit. This can 
only be maintained by those who have not the 
remotest conception of the life, the feelings and 
thoughts, of the Anglo-American race. What 
appears to us as the preacher’s tone 1s to them 
a sustained style, what disgusts us as unctuous- 
ness is to them an expression of religious emo- 
tion. It was simply impossible for Harriet 
Beecher Stowe to give an artistic reproduction of 


Tales of the Soil 239 


Uncle Tom’s environment without emphasizing 
as forcibly as possible the godliness and relig- 
iosity of all the better elements. The author 
of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a liberal in the 
broadest sense of the word; all the freer in that 
she had thrown off her spiritual fetters herself; 
a woman of spirit, of modern culture. Whoever 
repeats the judgment of her pious didacticism 
current among ill-informed writers on American 
literature has evidently read none of her other 
books, in which the feeling for environment and 
the subtle psychology remind one strongly of 
George Eliot. Read the following clear-cut 
sayings, and see how remote Mrs. Stowe was 
from unction and cant: 

“He was one of those men willing to play with 
any charming woman the game of those naviga- 
tors who give to simple natives glass beads and 
feathers in return for gold and diamonds; to ac- 
cept from a woman her heart’s blood in return 
for such odds, ends, and clippings as he could 
afford her from the serious ambitions of life.”’ 

“Tf women have one weakness more marked 
than another, it is toward veneration. They 
are born worshippers—makers of silver shrines 
for some divinity or other, which, of course, they 
always think fell straight from heaven.” 


240 American Literature 


‘He gave only the results of thought, not its 
incipient processes; and the consequence was 
that few could follow him.” 

“There are some people who receive from 
nature as a gift a sort of graceful facility of 
sympathy by which they incline to take on, for 
the time being, the sentiments and opinions of 
those with whom they converse, as the chame- 
leon was fabled to change its hue with every 
surrounding. Such are often supposed to be 
wilfully acting a part, as exerting themselves to 
flatter and deceive, when in fact they are only 
framed so sensitive to the sphere of mental 
emanation which surrounds others that it would 
require an exertion not in some measure to har- 
monize with it.”’ 

‘No moral argument, since the world began, 
ever prevailed over 25 per cent. profit.”’ 

‘‘Our minister was one of those cold, clear-cut, 

polished crystals that are formed in the cooling- 
‘down of society, after it has been melted and 
purified by a great enthusiasm.” 

“Your Yankee has such a sense of value, that, 
if he pays a man to thrash him, he wants to be 
thrashed thoroughly.” 

As the daughter of a divine, Harriet under- 
stood the inmost soul of Puritan theology, and 


Tales of the Soil 241 


we are consequently indebted to her for a num- 
ber of keen and illuminating sayings regarding | 
the Puritan spirit. 

Jonathan Rossiter’s confession of unbelief is 
the result of long and varied experience in many 
climes, of a rare self-knowledge and penetrating 
analytical thought. One need not hesitate to 
compare the author of that piece of literature 
with a master like George Eliot. 

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a wonderful hit, 
but it was not an accident. Only now, after a 
lapse of sixty years, are we in a position to judge 
how much of its tremendous success was due to 
a happy conjuncture of circumstances, how 
much to intrinsic merit. We see now that 
Harriet not only had as clear and correct a con- 
ception of the negro question as her greatest con- 
temporaries, but that she penetrated the future 
with veritably prophetic genius. She divined, 
what escaped men of the keenest vision, that 
the negroes themselves were not ripe for free- 
dom; that the time immediately succeeding 
emancipation would be more dreadful than 
slavery; she felt that the negroes faced years of 
the sorest trials; that a purifying educational 
process would be necessary in order to develop 
these semi-animals into whole human beings. 


242 American Literature 


Who was to take upon himself this formidable 
task? Not the negro, but the mulatto. I have 
remarked before that two of the characters in 
“ Unele Tom’s'Cabin’’: are)portraits; Wane st. 
Claire and Ophelia; an essential addition must 
be made to that observation. The mulatto, 
George Harris, son of a white father and a negro 
mother, is evidently carefully drawn from na- 
ture. And to my mind this Harris, despite the 
title of the book, is the centre of interest of the 
whole story; and indeed it is with this character 
that the conclusion of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”’ is 
concerned. Uncle Tom, the full-blooded negro, 
dies; he succumbs to the torture inflicted by his 
fiendish master; Harris, on the contrary, escapes 
and triumphs over his tormentor. This con- 
trast 1s significant, it is a fundamental idea of 
the book. 

The pure negro, childish, with few wants, 
easily satisfied, trampled upon for thousands of 
years by alien races, would never have brought 
the unspeakable sufferings of slavery to the light 
of day. The defenders of the system had a 
shadow of right on their side when they pointed 
to the exuberant cheerfulness of the negroes, 
to their unfailing vitality, to their affection for 
their owners, to the indisputable fact that many 


Tales of the Soil 243 


of them would not accept the proffered freedom, 
assigning the Biblical reason, “I love my mas- 
ter.” 

The crying injustice of slavery was first felt 
and expressed in all its enormity by colored 
persons of mixed blood, like Harris; the blood 
of a masterful nature inherited from the father 
rebelled against a slave’s fate, and was not to be 
pacified either by kind treatment or by the lash. 

“My master!” cried George, when, out of 
sheer malice, his owner degrades him from a 
mechanic to a field-hand, ‘‘and who made him 
my master? That is what I think of—what 
right has he to me? I’m a man as much as he 
is. I’ma better manthan heis. I know more 
about business than he does; | am a better 
manager than he is; I can read better than he 
can; I can write a better hand—and I’ve learned 
it all myself, and no thanks to him—I’ve learned 
it in spite of him; and now what right has he to 
make a dray-horse of me—to take me from 
things I can do, do better than he can, and put 
me to work that any horse cando? . . . | 
have been careful, and I have been patient, but 
it’s growing worse and worse; flesh and blood 
can’t bear it any longer. “ 

And this George Harris, oe he attains 


244 American Literature 


freedom and a competence, devotes himself to 
the service of the negro, in spite of the fact that 
he could pass for a Spaniard or an Italian, so 
little characteristic of the black are his features. 

“I feel somewhat at a loss as to my future 
course,” he writes to a friend. ‘“‘True, as you 
have said to me, I might mingle in the circles of 
the whites in this country, my shade of color 1s 
so slight and that of my wife and family scarce 
perceptible. Well, perhaps on sufferance, | 
might. But, to tell you the truth, | have no 
wish to. 

“My sympathies are not for my father’s race, 
but for my mother’s. To him I was no more 
than a fine dog or horse; to my poor heart-broken 
mother I was a child; and though I never saw 
her, after the cruel sale that separated us, tll 
she died, yet I know she always loved me dearly. 
I know it by my own heart. When I think of 
all she suffered, of my own early sufferings, of 
the distresses and struggles of my heroic wife, 
of my sister—sold in the New Orleans slave- 
market—though I hope to have no unchristian 
sentiments, yet I may be excused for saying I 
have no wish to pass for an American, or to 
identify myself with them. 

“Tt is with the oppressed, enslaved African 


Tales of the Soil 245 


race that [ cast in my lot; and, if I wished any- 
thing, I would wish myself two shades darker 
rather than one lighter.” 

How these words written sixty years ago have 
been verified! If George Harris was then a 
creature of the imagination, he has to-day found 
embodiment in the negro leader W. E. Burghard 
Du Bois. One must read what William Archer 
has to say of that eminent man,* to see how pro- 
foundly Harriet Beecher Stowe had penetrated 
into the heart of the negro problem. 

4. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.—The soul of the 
American negro has been most vividly presented 
to us by Joel Chandler Harris (1 848-1906), the 
author of “‘Uncle Remus.”” Uncle Remus is the 
old negro who relates stories about the fox and 
the rabbit to the son of the house. 

In Puritan households the negroes represent 
the natural, or, as theologians term it, the ‘‘crea- 
ture’ element in the family; the children always 
sought refuge from parental chastisement in 
Juno’s or Czsar’s loving and unquestioningly 
wide-opened arms. It is to this loyal relation- 
ship between the slaves and the children of the 
house that we owe that wonderful children’s 
book, “Uncle Remus.”’ 


*“Through Afro-America,” London, 1911. 


246 American Literature 


“Brer Fox” and “Brer Rabbit” live in a con- 
stant feud, and the fox always gets the worst of 
it. As an illustration let me reproduce the 
delicious story of the “Tar-Baby”’: 


THE WONDERFUL TAR-BABY STORY 


“Didn’t the fox never catch the rabbit, Uncle 
Remus?” asked the little boy the next evening. 

‘He come mighty nigh it, honey, sho’s you bawn 
—Brer Fox did. One day atter Brer Rabbit fool 
’im wid dat calamus root, Brer Fox went ter wuk 
en got ’im som tar, en mix it wid some turkentine, 
en fix up a contrapshun what he call a Tar-Baby, 
an he tuk dish yer Tar-Baby an he sot ’er in de big 
road, en den he lay off in de bushes fer ter see what 
de news waz gwineter be. And he didn’t hatter 
wait long, nudder, kaze bimeby here come Brer 
Rabbit pacin’ down de road—lippity-clippity clip- 
pity-lippity—dez ez sassy ez a jay-bird. Brer 
Fox, he lay low. Brer Rabbit come prancin’ ‘long 
twel he spy de Tar-Baby, en den he fotch up on his 
behime-legs like he wuz ’stonished. De Tar-Baby, 
she sot dar, she did, en Brer Fox, he lay low. 

“‘Mawnin’ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee—‘nice wedder 
dis mawnin’,’ sezee. 

“Tar-Baby ain’t sayin’ nuthin,’ en Brer Fox, he 
lay low. 

“How duz yo’ sym’toms seem ter segashuate?’ 
sez Brer Rabbit, sezeée. 

“Brer Fox, he wink his eye slow, en lay low, en de 
Tar-Baby, she ain’t sayin’ nuthin.’ 


Tales of the Soil 247 


“How you come on, den? Is you deaf?’ sez 
Brer Rabbit, sezee, ‘Kaze if you is, I kin holler 
louder,’ sezee. 

“Tar-Baby stay still, en Brer Fox, he lay low. 

“*Youer stuck up, dat’s what you is,’ says Brer 
Rabbit, sezee, ‘en I gwineter kyore you, dat’s what 
I’m gwineter do,’ sezee. 

“Brer Fox, he sorter chuckle in his stummuck, he 
did, but Tar-Baby ain’t sayin’ nuthin’. 

“Tm gwineter learn you howter talk ter * spec- 
tubble fokes ef hit’s de las’ ack,’ sez Brer Rabbit, 
sezee. ‘Ef you don’t take off dat hat en tell me 
howdy, I’m gwineter bus you wide open,’ sezee. 

“Tar-Baby stay still, en Brer Fox, he lay low. 

“Brer Rabbit keep on axin’ ’im, en de Tar-Baby, 
she keep on sayin’ nuthin’, twel presently Brer 
Rabbit draw back wid his fis’, he did, en blip he ° 
tuck ’er side er de head. Right dar’s whar he broke 
his merlasses jug. His fis’ stuck, en he can’t pull 
loose. De tar hilt ’im. But Tar-Baby, she stay 
still, en Brer Fox, he lay low. 

“EF you don’t lemme loose, I'll knock you agin’,’ 
sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, en wid dat he fotch ’er a 
wipe wid de unner han’, en dat stuck. Tar-Baby, 
she ain’t sayin’ nuthin,’ an Brer Fox, he lay low. 

“Twn me loose, fore I kick de natal stuffin’ outen 
you,’ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, but de Tar-Baby, she 
ain’t sayin’ nuthin’. She des hilt on, en den Brer 
Rabbit he lose de use er his feet in de same way. 
Brer Fox, he lay low. Den Brer Rabbit he squall out 
det ef der Tar-Baby don’t tu’n ’im loose, he butt ’er 


248 American Literature 


cranksided. En den he butted, en his head got 
stuck. Den Brer Fox, he sa’ntered fort’, lookin’ 
des ez innercent ez wunner yo’ mammy’s mockin’ 
birds. 

“Howdy, Brer Rabbit,’ sez Brer Fox, sezee. 
“You look sorter stuck up dis mawnin’,’ sezee, en den 
he rolled on de groun’, en laft twel he couldn’t laff 
no mo’. ‘I speck you'll take dinner wid me dis 
time, Brer Rabbit. I done laid in some calamus 
root, en [ ain’t gwineter take no skuse,’ sez Brer Fox, 
sezee.” 

Here Uncle Remus paused, and drew a two-pound 
yam out of the ashes. 

“Did the fox eat the rabbit?” asked the little boy 
to whom the story had been told. 

“‘Dat’s all de fur de tale goes,’ replied the old 
man. ‘“‘He mout, en den again he moutent. Some 
say Jedge B’ar come ’long en loosed him—some say 
he didn’t. I hear Miss Sally callin’. You better 


Pd 33 
run ’long. 


To investigate the sources of the stories of the 
fox and the rabbit is a task for the student of 
folklore. The layman is struck with the idea 
that in reversing the réles usually assigned to the 
two animals in other animal stories and fables, 
the oppressed negro race takes its harmless re- 
venge by representing the strong and unscrupu- 
lous creature as a victim of the weaker one. 
Connoisseurs admire the wonderful fidelity with 


Tales of the Soil 249 


which the pronunciation, the vocabulary, and 
the sentence structure of the negro are repro- 
duced in “‘ Uncle Remus.”’ 

This little book, which in America is as widely 
read as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”’ was followed by 
several sequels: ‘Nights with Uncle Remus’”’ 
(1883) and “Uncle Remus and His Friends” 
(1893). 

The seamy side of negro emancipation 1s 
brought out by Harris in the sketch “ Free Joe.” 
The negro, Joe, was set free by his abolitionist 
master. At first he was delighted with his un- 
accustomed liberty; gradually, however, he 
realized his peculiar position: he became con- 
scious that in spite of his freedom he was more 
helpless than a slave. Since he had no owner, 
everybody was his master. He noticed that he 
was an object of suspicion; therefore all his little 
resources—and how pitifully slender they were 
were employed to obtain not friendliness and 
esteem but toleration; all his efforts were centred 
upon mitigating the circumstances which made 
his condition so much worse than that of the 
other negroes, the negroes who had friends be- 
cause they had masters. 

Very recently Lucy Pratt, in her “‘ Ezekiel,” 
has depicted with the deepest sympathy the 


250 American Literature 


nature of the negro child. Stephen Collins 
Foster (1826-1864) likewise sought to give ex- 
pression to the inner life of the negro. He wrote 
and set to music more than a hundred and 
twenty-five negro songs. Of these, The Old 
Folks at Home, so full of tenderness and pathos, 
is the most widely known. Whether these 
songs, which have become popular among the 
whites, really represent the negro soul is a 
question which the negroes alone can answer. 


THE END 


INDEX OF AUTHORS 


Ade, George . 

Pease; 7. L, K. 
Alcott, Amos Bronson . 
Allen, James Lane . 


Bacheller, Irving 
Bancroft, George 
Bierce, Ambrose 


Brackenbridge, Hugh ay 


Bradford, William 
Bradstreet, Anna. : 
Brown, Charles Brockden . 
Bryant, William Cullen 
Bunner, H. C. 


Cable, G. W. 
Channing, William rie 
Child, Francis James 
Churchill, Winston 


Cooper, James Fenimore 


Dana, Richard Henry . 
Deland, Margaret 
Dodge, H. C. : 
Drake, Joseph Rodman 
Dwight, Timothy 

2st 


Sa ee 39 


PAGE 

214 

16 

16, 80 

. 220-224 


a3 
10 


1S 070 


13, 47, 51, 61-65 
186 


219 
16, 80 
155 
23 


57, 
ZY 


252 Index 


Earle, Alice Morse 
Edwards, Jonathan . 
Eggleston, Edward 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 


Field, Eugene 

Fiske, John 
Ford, Paul Leicester 
Forster, Hannah W. 
Foster, Stephen Collins 
Franklin, Benjamin 
Frederic, Harold 
Freneau, Philip . 
Fuller, Margaret 


Hale, Edward Everett . 
Halleck, Fitz-Greene  . 
Harris, Joel Chandler . 
Harte, Bret 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 
Higginson, T. W. . 
Holmes, Oliver eth 
Howe, Julia Ward 
Howells, William Dean 


Irving, Washington 
Jackson, Helen Hunt 
~James, Henry 


Judson, Emily 


Lanier, Sidney 
Peland, © G: 


of Authors 


PAGE 


44 
41 
. 218-219 
16, 82-95 


. 187-191 

10 

23 

S, 

250 
it, 14, 25-55 
229 


54 
80 


156 

57 

- 245-249 

217 
14, 13, 158, 170-178 
ee as, 

131- ae 186, 186, 215 
ee 

. 181-184 


13, 29-32,199 


: 21 
. 178-180 » 
Rete 


77, 78-79 
194 


Index of Authors 2. 


Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth . 
Lowell, James Russell . 


Melville, Herman 
Miller, Joaquin . 


Morton, Sarah Wertwondy 


Motley, J. L. 


Norris, Frank 


Norton, Charles Eliot 


O’Brien, Fitz-James 
Parkman, Francis 
Paco, 1. VW... 
Payne, J. H. 
Percival, J. G 
Pierpont, John . 
Poe, Edgar Allen 
Pratt, inicy . 


Rowson, Susanna Haswell 


oe 
Schoolcraft, Henry R. 


Sedgwick, Catharine Maria 


Smith, Captain John 
Stockton, Frank R. 


Stoddard, Richard Henry 


Story, W. W. 


Stowe, Harriet Beecher 


Taylor, Bayard . 


Thoreau, Henry David. 


775 157) 158, 159-170 


PAGE 
JAG 120-141 
13, 146-155 


81, 116-117 
6 
21 
16 


170 
IO 
v2 
55 
50 
71 


249 
9 


186 

Pars 

. 217-218 

5 

192 

74 

: 72 
22, 43, 235, 245 


74-76 
16, 95-99 


254 _ Index of Authors 


PAGE 
Jocknor George) 8) 
Timrod, Henry . Rea ah i ee ay. 
‘ranscendéntalists, The 4.01. ee eco 
tetobell, Jonna oe ee 
Dicker, George). a ae ee 
Dwain, Wark, 8 ee a 
EU OE es ee 9 
NOE ONE ie Ce 
Ward, Artemis. 0. 6.0.) 0 ee 
Mromimnan, Walt 6 
Whiter, fon Greenlee 2°, 65 
OUR, NORV Te 
RMR Bc 


WOCEWOrTs, DamMUGL =... 2S ee 


The American Books 


A Library of Good Citizenship 


O vote regularly and conscientiously and 
never to have been arrested for disorder 
is not the be-all and end-all of good citi- 

zenship. The good citizen is he or she who bears 
an active hand in cleansing and making merry 
the black spots of the neighborhood; who cher- 
ishes a home however small; who takes an 
increasingly intelligent interest in all that con- 
tributes to the country’s welfare, and feels a 
keenly patriotic hope for the future of the nation. 

For such citizens THE AMERICAN BOOKS are 
designed—a series of small volumes on current 
American problems. The keynote of the series 
will be the discussion of distinctively American 
movements and questions connected with the 
future prosperity of the United States. 

The series was planned long before the great 
war, butit has derived added importance from 
the position which that great struggle has given 
America on the face of the globe. The United 
States, standing aloof from the suicidal blood- 
shed of the Old World, has necessarily become 
the peaceful arbiter of the earth’s destinies and 
the flywheel to keep the world’s industry re- 
volving. 


An inquiry into the meaning and tendency of 
American civilization to-day is thus not only a 
matter of interest but of patriotic duty. The 
publishers wish THE AMERICAN BOOKS to be a 
series of brief, authoritative manuals which will 
attempt to lay bare some of the problems that 
confront us to-day; written in popular terms that 
will inspire rather than discourage the casual 
reader. The series should prove not only of 
great interest to all American citizens who wish 
to aid in solving their country’s pressing prob- 
lems, but to every foreigner visiting this country 
who seeks an interpretation of the American 
point of view. 

The publishers wish THE AMERICAN BOOKS to 
be written by the best men, and to this end they 
seek the widest publicity for the plan. They 
will be glad to receive suggestions as to appro- 
priate titles for inclusion in the series and will 
welcome authoritative MSS submitted from any 
quarter. In particular they submit the plan to 
the consideration of the American colleges where 
the problems of the country are being studied. 
In science, literature, business, politics, in the 
arts of war and the arts of peace, the publishers 
will seek writers who have stood for fearless 
achievement or equally fearless failure, who will 
build up A Liprary or Goop CITIZENSHIP. 


(For complete list of volumes in 
this series see opposite title page.) 





THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 


ie 
oS 


ad ee 2 
ey 


a 
ee 


= 
d le 


- 
7 
ee : 
= : 








14 DAY USE 
RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 


LOAN DEPT. 


This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
on the date to which renewed. 
Renewed books are subject to immediate recall 


SNEWALS ONLY - Tel. No.-642= 
















































































































































































se RECE/\ Db 
JUN 3 '68-I2P : 
AUG T3-1960-+-9 AN : 
12 oe 
er D : d 
ee roo a 












































he | 


LD 21A~45m-9,'67 ,General Library 
(H5067s10)476B 

















Me 


UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 


ims cena tascam ae eel 





1 










































































































































































































































































































































































